Charlie’s likable, and the baseball set pieces are beyond reproach, but Lupica’s signature one-liners (Bump and Run, 2000,...
Scouting report on sportswriter Lupica’s baseball novel: pretty good stuff, needs to work on control.
Once upon a time “Showtime” Charlie Stoddard had a golden arm, among the best ever to make it to “the Bigs.” But he abused it—sorely—and the rest of himself as well: booze and babes, Charley a committed hedonist from the time he could spell party. Actually, he abused just about everything in his life, including his relationship with his furiously resentful son and long-resigned wife. As the story opens, he’s 40, five years away from his last (dismal) appearance on a professional mound, spending his time signing autographs for money and chasing women from habit. Enter fate, in the form of a Chinese-American wonder-working physical therapist who offers him what so few of us ever get: a second chance. Charlie’s been messed up by knife-happy quacks, Mr. Chang tells him, but he’s salvageable if he’s willing to work. Charlie and Chang become a team, and almost at once redemption sets in: 90 m.p.h fastballs and an arm free of debilitating pain. In the meantime, the Boston Red Sox, battling a variety of famous jinxes (see any history of baseball) and the hated New York Yankees as well are in desperate need of pitching help, so desperate they’re willing to gamble on Charlie. Moving into the climactic stage of the pennant race, the Sox have a staff composed largely of cripples and one potential Hall-of-Famer. He’s Tom Mackenzie, born Tom Stoddard, who changed his name as a measure of intense filial disregard. So now when Showtime Charlie stares in for his signal, he swiftly learns it’s a whole new ballgame.
Charlie’s likable, and the baseball set pieces are beyond reproach, but Lupica’s signature one-liners (Bump and Run, 2000, etc.) are relentless, consistently cutting the heart out of key emotional scenes.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14927-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
