A fully realized world is created by Honeycutt (Whistle Home, 1993, etc.) in this well-written story of a mill town's economic demise. Dasie, 11, has good reason to be proud of her father, who works a dangerous job in the saw mill that is the source of the town's livelihood. He is also a volunteer fireman and a former ``faller,'' highly skilled in the treacherous job of cutting down enormous trees. He and his wife have always expected Dasie's brother, Sam, to leave town and its waning economy when he came of age, and so it is that he joins the Navy. This is ``worse than hard'' for Dasie's mother, and only the first in a series of drastic changes in their lives. The mill closes; Dasie deals with conflicting feelings for her beloved cousin, Warren—who seems to be stepping into Sam's ``place''; Warren, in the meantime, reveals his true, aimless nature and later drives his motorcycle into a tree. From the outset the story rings true. Dasie's mother once told her that in death, ``the only thing that counts is the kindness of understanding''; throughout, Dasie is the one who understands, bringing readers along with her. The vivid details of logging and small-town life read as if Honeycutt has seen, felt, and touched everything in Grace Falls, and then passed it on with poetic turns of phrasing, e.g., part of the cemetery, where Warren will ultimately be laid to rest, is ``lightly wooded, where grass was a sometime thing.'' (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-531-30007-2
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Orchard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In the Wild West, bullets flew in barrooms; today, it’s epiphanies. One should beware of both.
A sometimes teary and always beery memoir of a son, a dying father, and their mutual love affair with Cleveland and its football Browns.
U.S. News and World Report editor McGraw begins in August 1999 on the day his father, terminally ill with colon cancer, entered a hospice. First identifying himself as “the family fuckup” (a characterization he proves beyond a reasonable doubt in subsequent pages), the author then adopts a rough chronology, following in desultory fashion the dismal fortunes of the 1999 Browns, the NFL expansion team awarded to Cleveland after the previous owner, Art Modell, had whisked the old Browns away to greener (i.e., more profitable) pastures in Baltimore (a “little rape act,” as McGraw puts it). Intercut with brief accounts of the 1999 Browns’ 2–14 season are descriptions of the author’s Irish Catholic boyhood and extraordinarily dissolute adolescence, of his father (a noted Cleveland trial attorney who was both hero and nemesis to his son), of the “old” (highly successful) Browns, of other professional athletic teams in Cleveland, of the hours the author spent in neighborhood bars (where he was a popular regular), and of his father’s final moments of life. McGraw is disturbed that the new Browns seem more interested in luring yuppie families to the games than in catering to their old fans (who, as the author admits, were noted for drunkenness, violence, and urinating in drinking fountains). “[E]verything about these new Browns seemed regimented and scripted,” he complains—and in one manic, indecent burst of hyperbole he compares the current team management to Nazis. McGraw’s other principal concern is to make certain we know about his prodigious drinking problem; for most of his adulthood, we learn, he has been drunk—a condition that would explain some of his more bizarre declarations (e.g., women have not played football, so they are more likely than men to hold grudges).
In the Wild West, bullets flew in barrooms; today, it’s epiphanies. One should beware of both.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-49833-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
A heartfelt, painful family saga, skillfully told by a survivor.
Essayist Handler debuts with a memoir of loving sibling bonds cruelly interrupted.
The author’s eight-year-old sister Susie died of leukemia in 1969, when Handler was ten. Their sister Sarah had been ill since infancy with Kostmann’s Syndrome, a bone-marrow disorder like leukemia, but much more rare; she died at age 27 in 1992. Yet Susie and Sarah were at her 1998 wedding, the author avers. They remain vividly present in memory, appearing in the waking reveries and sleeping dreams of their healthy sibling. The girls’ parents were liberal Yankee Jews transplanted to suburban Atlanta in the ’60s. They lived with their children on “a lush street where professors and doctors grew big gardens and tied bandannas around the necks of their Irish setters.” Dad, a crusading labor lawyer, was terrified by his daughters’ illnesses. He went a bit mad, was hospitalized, fled to the Far East and then returned for a divorce. (Perhaps, Handler muses, Dad was angry with her for having a future.) Mom pretended all was well, but the entire family was plunged into darkness by the deaths of two daughters. The author’s stark, lucid prose probes what those losses did to her parents and to her. Handler moved from Atlanta’s Coca-Cola society to the coke culture of Los Angeles. She maintained a journal and kept pertinent ephemera. In 2004-05, she obtained and pored over copious medical files on her sisters’ symptoms, medications and clinical trials. With a sure grasp of revelatory detail, the author recalls homely verities from a vanished life. Her memory piece is an elegy for her dead sisters, who are not quite lost as long as they live in her thoughts.
A heartfelt, painful family saga, skillfully told by a survivor.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58648-648-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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