A second novel by McCunn (Thousand Pieces of Gold, 1981) about the plight of Chinese immigrants, this one again tracing through the imagined life of a real person the raw misery of loneliness and fear and the brave insistence on survival. Botanist Lue Gim Gong (d. 1925) performed experiments in hybridization that made a seminal contribution to Florida's citrus industry, yet like many Chinese in the US, he suffered ostracism inspired by prejudice. His mother, Sum Jui, is the first narrator of these ``wooden fish songs'' of lament and emptiness; her story begins in 1842 in rural China and chronicles family tyranny, hunger, worry for children and grandchildren—one forever lost, one murdered. But Sun Jui draws courage from her good husband and hopes for a better future for Gim Gong, who, like his brother and uncle, travels to America. Life among the ``foreign ghosts'' is hard and confusing for the Chinese, who are themselves incomprehensible to the citizens of North Adams, Massachusetts, where spinster Fanny Burlingame—the second narrator—is intrigued by the fresh and eager intelligence of young Lue. Starved for education herself, Fanny becomes the boy's tutor, friend, and later patron. But Fanny believes (despite some misgivings) that she must convert Lue to Christianity. Predictably, then, when the good son returns to China, he brings with him the curse of these alienating ``ghosts.'' After Fanny's death in Florida, Lue continues his work in the US with orange varieties. His scientific contributions are welcomed, but he is still shunned socially. As Sheba, daughter of slaves (and narrator number three), declares, ``Lue cried in the night'' like the Conjure Man of Africa in his magic-alligator shape. Communal ignorance and fear—in both America and China—have done their corrosive worst. A worthy tale of landmark events in a Chinese-American's remarkable life—and hard times—in two cultures.
Pub Date: May 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93927-X
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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