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
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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