THE WIND DOG

Name: THE WIND DOG
Author: Tom Paulin
ISBN: 0-571-20168-7

by Tom Paulin ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2000

Forgive Paulin his transgressions. Taken as a whole, these meditations on the nature of Irish identity are sinuous and...

bookshelf

Over the years, Paulin has emerged from the thicket of contemporary Irish poets as an original and challenging voice. Like his compatriot Seamus Heaney, Paulin struggles with a sense of divided loyalties: born in Leeds, he grew up in Belfast, and now teaches English literature at Oxford. Here, he explores the tensions between Irish and English ideologies, accents, languages, limitations, and possibilities. Unlike Heaney, Paulin tends to mark these divisions through narratives about language rather than politics. Ghosts, living and dead—from Chagall to Verlaine, from Lucan to Larkin—haunt these pages, but of all these figures, James Joyce casts the longest shadow. Paulin’s improvisatory, allusive, pun-filled, occasionally baggy style owes much to the great novelist but is not always up to the comparison. When it works, his synthesizing technique achieves wonders: the long title poem, for instance, is woven around the image of the “wind dog,” a dialect phrase for “a wee broken bitta rainbow.” The off-kilter word illuminates suddenly the relationship between history and the creative powers of language, as when Paulin invokes William Tyndale (who translated the Bible into English in the 16th century and was burned at the stake for his pains). “[T]hey may have turned Tyndale into tinder,” he writes, “but the bow he wrought lives high / in this wet blue sky.” Elsewhere, Paulin’s elliptic prosody feels like navel-gazing. As he puts it in “Cuas,” “what interests me / is my own unease.” This can lead him to myopic, insufficiently ironic lines, like these in “Fortogiveness”: “and forgive me too that unlike Hugo / I’ve not been a freelance writer / for the last twenty or more years / but instead have held down a job.”

Forgive Paulin his transgressions. Taken as a whole, these meditations on the nature of Irish identity are sinuous and profound.

Pub Date: June 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-571-20168-7

Page Count: 86

Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

MAGIC HOUR

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

bookshelf

Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

bookshelf

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

bookshelf

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.