It may seem misanthropic to criticize a collection in which all 18 stories were donated to benefit Share Our Strength, an anti- hunger group. But charity shouldn't be a cover for bad writing, and this hodgepodge has more than its share of sloppy work. The tales reflect a common intent, the exploration of domestic life in all its messiness, returning again and again to the effort to define the meaning of ``home.'' Melanie Rae Thon's ``The Snow Thief'' focuses on an unhappy, childless woman, keeping a deathwatch for her father and looking back over her life; Po Bronson's ``The Impossible to Kill Me Game'' explores a fatherless young boy's fear of abandonment surfacing as his mother takes up with a new man. In Gary Krist's facile ``Sleep,'' an anxious broker in international finance chooses family over the incessant late- night calls from London. And in Louis B. Jones's clever ``Stone,'' a married man's focus on passing a kidney stone allows him to ignore everything else in his life crumbling around him. Judith Freeman revisits the muted world of her Mormon parents in ``Ofelia Rodriguez,'' the story of their unexpected daughter-in-law and grandchild. There are singularly amateurish stories by the poet Alice Fulton and newcomer Heidi Julavits: The first is a clumsy tale of Irish-Catholic spinster aunts, the second a confusing attempt at a cinematic-style chronicle about a distracted, impotent anthropologist, his suicidal wife, and the crew that chooses to film her death rather than save her. Robert Phillips's ``News About People You Know,'' tracing the inadvertent consequences of a social column in a small-town newspaper, stands out for its simple narrative virtues. Despite the claim that this is a collection of previously unpublished stories, at least two pieces (Frederick Barthelme's ``Dallas'' and Louis B. Jones's ``The Stone'') have appeared, in different versions, in print before. The consolation for this decidedly mixed collection: Your money goes to a good cause.
Pub Date: Nov. 14, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-600246-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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