From the strange and venerable Burroughs, a tiny slip of a book (to include 17 illustrations by the author) that becomes a cri de coeur for ecological sanity. In his spare, comic-hook style, Burroughs opens by telling—or telegraphing—the story of one Captain Mission who, in the 18th century, founded a "free pirate settlement, Libertatia, on the west coast of Madagascar." The settlement's self-imposed laws forbade harming the lemurs that dwelled on the island—although these kind and sensitive creatures ("lemur" meant "ghost" in the native tongue), needless to say, were to face calamitous treatment anyhow, by marauders from within and without—as was the mysterious stone temple that Captain Mission had discovered, known by him to be "the entrance to the biological Garden of lost Chances." When the temple is destroyed, and with it the lemurs' opportunity of developing into a yet more sensitive and wondrous species, "Mission knows that a chance that occurs only once in a hundred sixty million years has been lost forever." "Beauty is always doomed," writes Burroughs, placing the blame flatly on "Homo Sap with his weapons,...his insatiable greed, and ignorance so hideous it can never see its own face." And thus—for the balance of the book—is unleashed the formidable power of Burroughs the essayist of conscience, agony, and vitriol: chronicling Homo Sap's ravaging of other species ("The humans belch out the last passenger pigeon"), self-deluding opportunism and greed (including "the Christ Sickness" and the "war against drugs"), and the species' folly-laden susceptibility to certain revenge through increasingly vile, unimaginable new diseases and viruses, their effects described in ways calculated to chill the very blood of "Homo Sap, the Ugly Animal." Burroughs, in all, as the high lyric poet of wretched lost hopes. Or maybe not wholly lost: At book's end is an address, with an appeal for funds to help save the lemurs.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-85242-406-0
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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