Should be tucked into every Midwestern beach bag.
Summer people, townies, migrant workers and an Indian jostle one another in newcomer Amick’s fond, wise and thoroughly enjoyable look at a gentrifying midwestern vacationland.
The increasingly upscale resort and farming village of Weneshkeen sits somewhere south of the Michigan Hamptons, occupying the land between little Lake Meenigeesis and nearby Lake Michigan. Most of the Ojaanimiziibii Indians who greeted the first European explorers and opportunists have long since been displaced, but Navy SEAL, Vietnam vet and indigenous Indian cynic Roger Drinkwater, comfortably self-employed with a financial cushion from the nearby casino, has hung onto his little piece of the increasingly valuable local property. An eligible but prickly bachelor, Roger spends the long hours away from his not very demanding jerky business waging a clandestine war on the immensely irritating and numerous jet skis that make his morning swim across Lake Meenigeesis more and more dangerous. Well-built Deputy Janey Struska has her eye on Roger both as a suspect in the jet-ski vandalisms and as a pretty good-looking middle-aged Indian, so she has mixed feelings about her non-native Sheriff’s dogged pursuit of Roger as a danger to civilization. The jet-ski war is just one of a dozen or so story lines to be worked out over the length of this one pleasant summer. Among the Weneshkeenites with woes to work out are the Reverend Eugene Reecher, a widowed, retired and devilishly horny Presbyterian minister; Mark Starkey, an aimless teenager whose cute ass has gotten him mixed up with a pretty but very screwed-up rich girl; Kurt Lasko, a divorced septic-tank cleaner and Kimberley, his clever daughter; and the vonBushbergers, long-time cherry farmers whose family life has suddenly gone global. And at the edge of the village, rattling around alone in his architectural landmark, in frantic search for new revenue streams, lurks ex-dot-com zillionaire Noah Yoder, the man whose possible connection to David Letterman could change everyone’s life.
Should be tucked into every Midwestern beach bag.Pub Date: May 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42350-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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