Sequel to Trott's The Holy Man (1995), which hit the bestseller lists—in San Francisco—for weeks. Trott has written ten novels, including Divorcing Daddy (1992). This modest story picks up with enlightened Anna and snide husband Errol and their two small kids still at the Holy Man's retreat on a sacred mountain in an Eastern country. Joe the Holy Man, now in failing health in his mid-70s, wants to go down the mountain for the first time in 25 years and see his mentor, Chen, for a farewell visit. As it happens, Chen is 25 years younger than Joe and has built a ``Univers-City,'' where 2,500 young disciples pay to keep Chen in luxury. Joe and Anna have several minor adventures on their way to Chen, and from each Anna learns something new via Joe's wisdom. During a visit to a shop, Anne is nearly raped but learns to accept blame for putting herself in danger's way. From a cab driver with an obsession to collect rare clay pots she learns about repressed creativity. From three beggar women she learns how to help the deprived feel worthy. Anna, it turns out, also has a gift for healing. At last she and Joe meet Chen, a Chinese genius who grew up in a Cambodian monastery before becoming Joe's teacher. Chen sees Joe as a great trickster, and when Joe dies offstage as Chen is speaking to his huge student body in the Univers-City auditorium, it's an act that an astonished Chen calls Joe's greatest trick. When Chen and Anna carry the old man's sweet-smelling corpse back to his monastery for burial, Anna discovers that her abrasive husband has seemingly run off with the kids. Meanwhile, Joe's death serves to jolt Chen back to reality. All right, mildly entertaining, but clearly for the already pre-sold.
Pub Date: March 17, 1997
ISBN: 1-57322-057-4
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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