A heartening, honest portrait of public education and generational responsibility.
A lively novel about the trials and tribulations of teaching in the 21st century.
Mitchell Munson, known lovingly as Mr. Mumbles, is a teacher who has sharpened too many pencils and erased too many blackboards to tell lies. His passion for teaching is very much intact after decades of instruction, but he knows the score and doesn’t pretend he can’t see his tiny role in the great social sift. This witty, sardonic but never cynical approach to education and society is evidenced in his playful inner-monologues and the incessant discursive dialogues on topics from the movie Titanic to intellectualized fodder like the “American Meritocracy.” Like the best students, Mumbles still questions. Coach Jackson is, as befitting his station, more methodical and strategic in his approach to teaching and life. His simple vision of social progress is analogized in his relationship to basketball, a sport he believes has progressed and evolved into a superior form over the 20th century–a sport which has charted America’s obsession with perfection but also its disappointing civil relationships. The game, he concludes, is better than it was 50 years ago–though he’s quite certain Jerry West would have held his own in a modern game. Mumbles and Jackson, more than being a simple odd couple, are more the split-protagonists of the novel. They represent complementary and often contradictory attitudes, but their dialectic may be essential in rearing a generation capable of navigating the future. An epistolary subplot develops after Jackson finds letters his mother penned during his father’s service in the World War II. These elements aren’t always set as elegantly in the broader narrative as could be, but the letters are so compelling–even heartbreaking–that is likely due to all the rhetorical ground Bennett wants to cover. Still, Mumbles and Jackson’s friendship makes the novel memorable and satisfying.
A heartening, honest portrait of public education and generational responsibility.Pub Date: March 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-578-00804-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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