Prolific Johnston's (the Son of the Plains series; The Plainsmen series) vision of the West continues—grim, bleak, and unrelenting—in this sequel to Cry of the Hawk (1992). Having been reunited with his daughter, Hattie, aptly named Jonah Hook still must find his two sons and his wife, Gritta. Jonah's family had been previously abducted from their Missouri farm by Mormon brigands while he was off with Johnny Reb fighting Indians in the West as a ``galvanized Yankee.'' Now, after several hard years, Jonah is hot on the trail of abductor Jubilee Usher and his ``Avenging Angels.'' Poor Jonah loses the scent, though, when Brigham Young disavows Usher and banishes him before Jonah arrives in Salt Lake. So, sided by Shoshone Two Sleep, he wanders down to Sonora and later north up to Texas's Llano Estacado searching for his sons, whom he learns the Comanches have taken. (This over several more years.) Meanwhile, Jonah's mentor, old-time mountain man Shadrach Sweete, is scouting for the cavalry hot in pursuit of Tall Bull's Cheyenne. Among them is Sweete's son, High-Backed Bull, who's sworn to kill his father because he detests his white half. Johnston, injecting plenty of gunsmoke and violence, real and imagined, into his work, makes the reader privy to actual battles (Adobe Wells, etc.), all the more interesting because they're depicted mainly from the Indian point-of-view—plus barroom brawls, Indian pony raids, etc. Gritta is not recovered, making way for another installment. Realistic, full-fleshed characters and action permeated with the rank smell of grease, the creak of saddle leather, the screams of the dying and wounded. No surprises lie in wait, though, for those familiar with Western history and events.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-553-09508-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
A bold but flawed debut novel.
There’s a mystery, a coming-of-age, abundant melodrama and even more abundant medical lore in this idiosyncratic first novel from a doctor best known for the memoir My Own Country (1994).
The nun is struggling to give birth in the hospital. The surgeon (is he also the father?) dithers. The late-arriving OB-GYN takes charge, losing the mother but saving her babies, identical twins. We are in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1954. The Indian nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, was a trained nurse who had met the British surgeon Thomas Stone on a sea voyage ministering to passengers dying of typhus. She then served as his assistant for seven years. The emotionally repressed Stone never declared his love for her; had they really done the deed? After the delivery, Stone rejects the babies and leaves Ethiopia. This is good news for Hema (Dr. Hemalatha, the Indian gynecologist), who becomes their surrogate mother and names them Shiva and Marion. When Shiva stops breathing, Dr. Ghosh (another Indian) diagnoses his apnea; again, a medical emergency throws two characters together. Ghosh and Hema marry and make a happy family of four. Marion eventually emerges as narrator. “Where but in medicine,” he asks, “might our conjoined, matricidal, patrifugal, twisted fate be explained?” The question is key, revealing Verghese’s intent: a family saga in the context of medicine. The ambition is laudable, but too often accounts of operations—a bowel obstruction here, a vasectomy there—overwhelm the narrative. Characterization suffers. The boys’ Ethiopian identity goes unexplored. Shiva is an enigma, though it’s no surprise he’ll have a medical career, like his brother, though far less orthodox. They become estranged over a girl, and eventually Marion leaves for America and an internship in the Bronx (the final, most suspenseful section). Once again a medical emergency defines the characters, though they are not large enough to fill the positively operatic roles Verghese has ordained for them.
A bold but flawed debut novel.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-41449-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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