by Thomas Mallon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1997
The famous headline declaring Truman defeated by Dewey inspires Mallon's (Henry and Clara, 1994, etc.) old-fashioned look into the lives of a handful of the residents of Thomas E. Dewey's hometown of Owosso (pop. 16,000), Michigan. The year 1948, when Dewey did come close, was both a backward- and a forward-looking time. The widow Jane Herrick is so obsessed by the death of her son Arnie in WW II that she drives her younger son Tim to drink—and worse; and old widower Frank Sherwood not only remembers being a Rough Rider but has his own 50-year-old secret to protect. At the same time, for others, the future is all the rage. Anne Macmurray, college graduate and attractive (add: spunky and smart) young woman, works in the local bookstore (The Naked and the Dead is a new release) while pushing slowly forward with her own novel. Love creates the future, and Anne is courted both by the rich and handsome Peter Cox—running for state senate on the Dewey coattails—and by the earthy, up-from-poverty Jack Riley, who nurses his dying father while also working in Flint for the UAW. As the pre-election summer passes, town boosters—most notably local merchant Al Jackson—plan feverishly how to capitalize on Dewey's coming presidency. After the bunting, ceremonies, and parades, a permanent theme park—``Dewey Walk''- -will be built along the river, to draw tourism forever. All, of course, will taste of ashes in the chill dawn after election eve- -though not before a number of minor mysteries are cleared up, or before Anne Macmurray, in a flurry of purest melodrama, votes on her own true love. Nothing new for readers of Babbitt, but fine as a reminder of the period—cars, candidates, and radio shows all done with perfect pitch (`` `Yeah, Peter interrupted. `Ronald Reagan's wife. He's the union man out in Hollywood, isn't he, Jack?' '')
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-44425-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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