A disjointed oddity, well below Lehrer’s best work.
The prolific author (No Certain Rest, 2002, etc.) and PBS anchor takes two lunatic asylum inmates for protagonists in his quirky latest.
The Somerset asylum in Missouri is a nightmarish snake pit: the attendants subdue the patients with baseball bats, and the doctors covet their charges’ brains for research. In 1918, a humane physician, Will Mitchell, saves the life of Josh—mute by day, a screamer at night—and later effects a cure by having him talk about his special interest, the Centralia massacre of Union soldiers in 1864. For reasons we don’t learn until later, Josh can’t be released, but in 1933 he takes under his wing a new inmate, Birdie, fresh from witnessing the Union Station massacre in Kansas City. The young man is quick to mimic Josh’s former symptoms, and after Birdie is caught in the library stacks with a female volunteer, Josh helps him escape. The two men catch the Flying Crow to Union Station, which dazzles Josh with its splendor. He has pressing reasons to return to Somerset, but Birdie, though loath to lose his protector, will live at the station for 64 years before being rousted from his hideaway by a Kansas City cop, Randy Benton. The narrative jumps around among 1918, 1933, and 1997 as Randy unravels the mystery of Birdie and Josh. Lehrer’s 14th outing is powered by barely compatible interests: two historical massacres, the inhumane treatment of mental patients, and the era when railroads were king and stations were palaces. The lurid details of asylum life and the massacres overshadow Birdie and Josh, while the author’s keen nostalgia for the glory days of railroading assorts well with neither. Though Josh and his double-layered secret are accounted for, Birdie remains an enigma, an attractive, adventurous young man with possible Mob connections (we don’t know for sure) who grows deaf to everything save the siren song of Union Station.
A disjointed oddity, well below Lehrer’s best work.Pub Date: May 18, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6197-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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