A serious set of meditations on communism delivered with style and wit.
An eclectic gathering of short stories illustrating the burden of communism.
Domanski’s debut collects stories, often based in truth, devoted to Polish anti-communist activists. The brief pieces, some barely two pages, aim to capture the moral confusion and physical deprivation wrought by authoritarian communistic rule. Besides functioning as cautionary tales about tyranny begotten from political idealism, each one is like a moral parable, describing a struggle the author encountered. For example, in “Hen,” the narrator’s mother steals a hen to feed her family, justifying her crime by pointing out that hungry neighbors often purloin her own hens. The author was made complicit in the crime by being compelled to withhold the truth, but his guilt and desire to tell the truth were overcome by his love of the taste of fresh chicken broth. In “Crystals,” the author, only 15 years old at the time, recalls living under German occupation and discovering an abandoned store stocked with fine crystal. To spite the Germans, his crew smashed them all. He was later admonished by his mother for this act of wanton destruction, but, mired in poverty, he had never seen crystal and had no idea these were objects of great expense. Despite the tales’ serious subject matter, Domanski maintains a surprisingly lighthearted tone, injecting his prose with considerable humor. In “Bees,” a swarm of bees that continually attacks government figures is labeled anti-communist. While tightly centered on a common theme, the stories needn’t be read all at once or sequentially; each stands on its own. The author admits that some of these remembrances are woven out of both fact and fiction—and some are simply fictional—but this doesn’t detract from the power of the writing’s moral instruction. Never tediously didactic, this is a beautifully written collection of historically poignant vignettes.
A serious set of meditations on communism delivered with style and wit.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-8-36-419509-9
Page Count: 266
Publisher: LENA Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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