A masterful construction of the troubled conscience of the era and its aftermath.
A friendship between two women, forged during the tumult of 1968, is tested, torn and reaffirmed over the course of their very different lives.
Georgette George, a shy freshman scholarship student at Barnard, doesn’t know what to make of privileged, idealistic Ann Drayton. A firebrand for racial and social justice, Ann asked for a roommate “as different as possible” from her, in hope of bunking with a black woman, but accepts George, who is white, because at least she is from a poor home in upstate New York. The other freshmen find Ann a puzzle, too, and George befriends her initially because no one else—black or white—does. Over time, this headstrong self-made martyr, who gives away money by the fistful and lectures her bewildered parents on the sins of being white and rich, wins her heart, until Ann’s righteousness causes an irreconcilable rift. Long after the two go their separate ways—Ann continues her activism in Harlem with her black schoolteacher lover; George works her way up the masthead at a fashion magazine—Ann is arrested for killing a police officer. Although they haven’t spoken in years, George knows there is much more to the story than the newspapers report. Ann, who refuses all help, is convicted of murder and sentenced to life. George cannot begin to comprehend what has befallen her friend until she runs into Ann’s patrician father, recently widowed. In perhaps the ultimate betrayal, but perhaps also the only way to connect with the inscrutable Ann, they have an affair, which, especially as portrayed by the philosophically adroit Nunez (For Rouenna, 2001), eventually helps George understand that friendships have many chapters, and that Ann, who works on prison reform from the inside despite the wrath of her fellow inmates who won’t trust a white woman, just may not have closed the book on George yet.
A masterful construction of the troubled conscience of the era and its aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-18381-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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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