by William Van Wert ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1996
Van Wert (Stool Wives, p. 485, etc.) offers Hiram Walker, Florida trailer-park resident and engaging spokesman for the ``foreign country'' of old age: an everyman figure with a down-to- earth attitude living in the end zone. Seventy-nine-year-old Hiram, a former insurance salesman, retired to Florida with wife Rose. Rose, in Hiram's opinion, had begun dying with the move: She couldn't adjust to the heat, and by the time she really died, she'd pretty much given up on life. Not Hiram, though, who hasn't time to waste on grieving—there's too much to be done, including a final run for the park presidency against archrival Cyrus Applebee. This campaign gives a loose structure to what is more the life and wisdom of a man without pretensions. ``Fear and guilt are the worst trespassers on a life,'' he asserts. ``They're both counterproductive, they take up a lot of time, and they're antisocial.'' Hiram has a hand in various business enterprises that include providing the other residents with cheap prescriptions; he also organizes excursions to local sights, takes courses, and does a great deal of visiting. Meantime, as he describes his activities and offers his insights, he introduces the community to us: Widows, like Mary Smiley, who can't take care of their lawns but still dress up; unusual men like former bullfighter Caesar Medina, who reads a lot; Vance Petrale, who cultivates bonsai; Jake Marley, who fishes; and the women Hiram loves, sometimes chastely, like Charlene Dickerson, and sometimes not, like Mrs. Mylapore. The election is a shoo-in, and Hiram anticipates another busy year: When he dies, he says, he wants people to say, ``Just as well, he was all used up.'' Sometimes the humor is strained, but Van Wert's Hiram is more than a folksy wit and wisecracker: Here's a contemporary hero who fights back, refrains from self-pity, and always speaks his mind. A wonderfully fresh voice.
Pub Date: July 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81872-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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
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