This endlessly effluent, Woukmanlike novel which runs to almost 900 pages deals with a typical American family before World War II and up to Pearl Harbor and it is conveniently mapped from Washington to Berlin to Warsaw (the siege) and London (the blitz) and Moscow and Rome and points elsewhere. Real people appear. Churchill and Attlee and F.D.R. who calls our hero, Naval Commander Victor Henry, by his sobriquet Pug and will be heard saying "Good night, old top." In the beginning Wouk almost seems to be competing with Shirer — following not only Hitler's rise to power but explicating its mystique back to the Huns' earlier destruction of Imperial Rome via Hegel and Heine and one character here. His Commander Henry, however, a too hard working (cf. his wife Rhoda), good and considered man, restricts himself to the comment "I don't admire their treatment of the Jews" when he is Naval Attache in Berlin. The Henrys are solid middle-class Methodists and wouldn't go that far — but then they also don't quite like the fact that their son, Byron, has fallen in love with Jewish Natalie Jastrow, niece of the great scholar and author of A Jew's Jesus who lives a Berensonian existence in Siena. Eventually though she has finally married Byron, has had his child, and will be trapped in Italy with her uncle. Then there are the two other Henry children — and Rhoda's mid-marriage adultery — and a good many other characters none of whom seem very alive but then you're never close enough to pinch them and find out. All of it is written in Wouk's solid wearever prose which is not to underestimate the book's happily-or-unhappily ever after ongoing readability for all those faces in the crowd, ours and theirs — those with a lot of stickwhittling time on their hands.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1971
ISBN: 0316952664
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1971
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
