An enjoyable, if slightly preachy, story of a trip to the Arctic.
Debut novelist Peace tells the story of a woman who travels to Greenland to find a polar bear in the wild.
Reeling from the sudden death of her best friend, Amanda has trouble finding meaning in the Seattle-based marketing job to which she’s dedicated her life. She hopes to be awed by the polar bear exhibit at the local zoo, but even this is disappointing: “A feeling of sadness came over Amanda. She wondered if anyone realized how manufactured the zoo was.” A conversation with a similarly zoo-skeptical traveler convinces Amanda that she’ll need to go out into nature and seek out awesome experiences firsthand. She decides to put the rest of her life on hold and embark on a journey to northern Greenland in order to attain her new life goal: to see a polar bear in its natural surroundings. The journey ends up being a bit more than she bargained for, as she deals with the physical dangers of the high Arctic as well as psychologically defeating realizations about the Earth’s rapidly changing climate. Laying eyes on one of the world’s most endangered beasts may not change the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, but will it be enough to introduce Amanda to her core self? Peace writes in a simple yet elegant prose style, frequently mixing in facts and figures to keep the reader abreast of the situation’s real-life stakes: “A single polar bear’s natural territory can be hundreds of square miles….A typical zoo enclosure for a polar bear can be up to eighty million times smaller than a wild bear’s home range.” But these didactic flourishes, along with the meticulous documentation of Amanda’s journey (the novel is nearly 500 pages long), sometimes make the work read more like a travel memoir than a fictional account. The motivations for the trip also feel a bit contrived. But Amanda’s quest is compelling nevertheless: an adventure at the top of the world that feels relevant to the life of every reader—and to the planet as a whole.
An enjoyable, if slightly preachy, story of a trip to the Arctic.Pub Date: March 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9962705-0-2
Page Count: 498
Publisher: Norlight Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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SEEN & HEARD
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