Despite his book's depiction of dark realities—the guilt and despair of the characters’ interior lives is matched by...
Despite graphic deaths and a variety of police cases, Yarbrough’s 11th work of fiction (The Realm of Last Chances, 2013, etc.) is less a murder mystery than an exploration of how abruptly lives can go off the rails.
In 2006, Los Angeles Times reporter Richard Brennan is spending Christmas with his adored wife, Julia, and daughter, Anna, in Julia’s native Krakow. If the opening scene of domestic happiness, tree-trimming in a cozy apartment, feels too perfect to last, it is. A car accident kills Anna and Julia. Trapped in the passenger seat, Richard is sure he will never forget the face of the other driver, who glances into their car before fleeing the scene. That driver, never identified by the police, is Bogdan Baranowski, who's rushing to the hospital. A German shepherd has mauled his friend Marek as they made a botched robbery attempt, an act of desperation by men facing ruin in post-communist Poland. Over the novel’s 10-year span, Bogdan and Richard struggle separately to come to terms with what happened that night. Richard allows himself to become stunted by his grief. After helping another reporter cover the murder/suicide of a couple and their three children—a tragedy that, like the car crash, combines an accident of bad timing with bad decision-making—Richard realizes he’s lost his ambition as a serious journalist. Meanwhile, Bogdan drinks to excess and loses his job. His wife leaves him. He takes the rap for a minor crime and spends a year in prison to expiate his guilt over the Brennan deaths. But Bogdan’s potential goodness will have readers rooting for him. Actually, readers will root for all the novel’s tenderly drawn, flawed characters.
Despite his book's depiction of dark realities—the guilt and despair of the characters’ interior lives is matched by political turmoil in both the U.S. and Eastern Europe—Yarbrough’s pensively hopeful view of people’ capacity to endure, even prosper, shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60953-143-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
