With stroke-by-stroke miniature portraits and incantatory prose, Pulitzer Prize winner Kidder beautifully limns the characters and values that shape one New England town. Northampton, Mass. (pop.: 30,000) is a postcard-perfect community dating back to the 17th century, with rustic farms, Smith College, and a trendy downtown. One-time residents such as Jonathan Edwards, Sojourner Truth, and Calvin Coolidge gave rise to a largely Yankee tradition of moral uplift. Newcomers—including immigrants, the homeless, students, lesbians, and small-fry criminals—have complicated this social fabric without tearing it. Within this small city, Kidder finds, is an inextricable web of relationships, held together by a “tradition of secularized virtue that fed on dreams of ideal places.” As with The Soul of a New Machine (1981), Among Schoolchildren (1989), and House (1985), Kidder focuses on representative individuals, including a compassionate judge, a female mayor fretting over her budget, a young single mother trying to support her son and survive Smith College, and a real estate lawyer returning to the world after suffering from obsessive/compulsive disorder. His main character, however, is Tommy O’Connor, a 33-year-old cop born and raised in the town he now patrols with tough love. Adhering to a simple but strong moral code and a fierce sense of place, Tommy faces two dilemmas that will define his future. First, will he testify against a fellow cop and lifelong friend up on child molestation charges? And will he leave the police department, the job he coveted since childhood, to join the FBI? Through these people, Kidder conveys the appeal of —a place with a life that shelters individual lives” and the longing to escape its smothering embrace. A microcosm of how the traditional American “city on a hill” looks near the year 2000—all rendered in a classically graceful style as good as it gets. (First printing of 100,000; first serial to the Atlantic Monthly; Book-of-the-Month Club selection; author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-45588-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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