Just one criticism: The diversity on display does not extend to stories of minorities, which, considering all the talent out...
A rich, dense collection of 20 stories—King has harvested a bumper crop.
Auchincloss, Barth, Beattie, Boyle…the alphabetical order bunches together some big names at the start. The first three stories are entertaining and quirky, but T.C. Boyle’s “Balto” really hits paydirt. In this marvelous cliffhanger, about the forging of character, a 12-year-old girl can protect her beloved father if she lies under oath. What will she decide? Other family dramas also have real bite. The renowned Canadian Alice Munro explores intrepidly the aftermath of murder (“Dimension”). A deranged father has killed his three small children; his stoic, baffled wife visits him in the insane asylum; later, through his letters, she enters his twilit world, still reluctantly bound to him. The late Beverly Jensen looks at a large, loving, quarrelsome family (“Wake”). The head of the family has died. His children drive him through an ice storm to his burial in a remote Canadian village, where festive mourners greet the hearse in an extraordinary tableau. That boisterous affection for the dead is offset by two moving but unsentimental accounts of tenderness toward the dying (Stellar Kim’s “Findings and Impressions” and Eileen Pollack’s “The Bris”). Surrealism is represented by Karen Russell’s assimilation fable (“St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”) and Roy Kesey’s airport nightmare (“Wait”), while Bruce McAllister’s searing story about the crisis of conscience experienced by a CIA covert-ops guy who spreads plagues in left-wing Third World countries is a memorable example of speculative fiction (“The Boy in Zaquitos”). Also noteworthy are Richard Russo’s “Horseman,” an intriguing campus story that’s a subtle illustration of the saying that good teachers teach themselves, and Joseph Epstein’s “My Brother Eli,” a juicy if superficial portrait of the artist (a thinly disguised Saul Bellow) as a bastard.
Just one criticism: The diversity on display does not extend to stories of minorities, which, considering all the talent out there, is troubling.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-618-71347-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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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