A grand work of fiction, epic in scope and intimate in detail.
Terrell (The Huntsman, 2001) returns with a powerful story about the birth of the suburbs and the death of the American dream.
Jack Acheson is a quietly observant kid, and if he’s wise beyond his years, it’s because he’s blessed—or cursed—with a father who refuses to treat him like a child. Privy to the outsized dreams and underhanded dealings of Alton Acheson, Jack becomes his father’s chronicler. His story begins with the birth of the Interstate Highway in the 1950s, and it spans the last decades of the 20th century. A student of Gilded Age titans, Alton has special regard for Thomas Durant, the man who built the Transcontinental Railroad and—more importantly—purchased the land aongside it. When he sees his own chance for greatness in the new highway, he forms an alliance with revered Kansas City developer Prudential Bowen to buy Kings County farmland on the cheap and turn it into luxury housing and shopping centers for the new American commuter. Alton is a confidence man par excellence—a brilliant huckster and an individual with absolute faith in himself. A big man with long, blond hair and a fondness for pastel suits, Alton is a blithely conspicuous loudmouth and a constant source of mortification for his adolescent son. He’s also a spectacularly appealing character, able to turn nearly everyone around him—his son, his wife, his friends—into willing (if occasionally uneasy) accomplices. A clear-eyed visionary, Alton not only anticipates school desegregation and white flight, he depends on it. The fatal flaw in his scheme is not his amoral calculation, but his miscalculation: By the time bussing comes to Kansas City, Alton’s already been forced to trade his rich suburban acres for tenement buildings in a dying metropolis. An honest and unsentimental post mortem for America’s cities, this is also a moving and original coming-of-age story.
A grand work of fiction, epic in scope and intimate in detail.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03425-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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