An uneven but at times engaging war resistance tale that grapples with some of the moral complexities of the Vietnam era.
A group of callow but well-intentioned 1960s college students opposes the Vietnam War in this coming-of-age novel.
The grandson of a Colorado labor activist and a sometime college student, Tom Hill works construction jobs as a roofer. It is 1966 and the Vietnam War is heating up, but Tom, for the moment, seems more interested in his job site rivalry with a slow old-timer named Dennis whom he can run circles around. Dennis retaliates by firing a nail through part of Tom’s hand with his nail gun. Not only does Tom have to deal with his injury, but he has to confront his precarious student deferment status as well. The tale becomes intriguing when Bradbury (Kid Golly Speaks, 2018, etc.) focuses on Tom’s relationship with his student buddies, members of the steering committee for Peace Action Now, who are forever posturing and leafleting the university in their fictional Colorado campus town that somewhat resembles Boulder and Fort Collins. Tom has eyes for winsome committee member Sandra, the daughter of his mentor and adviser, the avuncular Professor Ellsworth Boyce, an expert in Colorado labor history and ardent supporter of the anti-war movement. The author effectively ratchets up the action as Tom deals with his draft board and the heavy consequences of his opposition to the war when the police attack him at a local rally. Bradbury deftly captures the taut confusion that takes place when Tom has to take his draft physical. Throughout, the author’s dialogue and prose prove crisp and sometimes succinct. “He would graduate winter quarter, 1968, the prime rate willing,” Bradbury writes of Tom. But often the book bogs down, mostly due to the lack of a strong editor (“Go the hell, Dennis”; “He decided he to get one at the post office”; “Still, their leader, Pete, upheld up the tradition willingly”).
An uneven but at times engaging war resistance tale that grapples with some of the moral complexities of the Vietnam era.Pub Date: May 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4787-7048-0
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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