A potpourri of stories, essays, letters, occasional pieces and even poems from the folksy humorist of Prairie Home Companion fame (Lake Wobegon Days, Leaving Home). It's uneven: his many fans will want to read it straight through, while others should browse and choose. Keillor's gift is a conversational tone that sneaks up on the reader with small insights, jokes, and tall tales refashioned for our times. His bane is a stubborn Northern Plains parochialism that he doesn't always recognize. Both are in evidence here. After a "Here at the New Yorker" introduction, he lets fly with spoofs (notably, "End of the Trail," about the last cigarette smokers in America, and "Glasnost: He Didn't Go to Canada," about Dan Quayle); some leftover Lake Wobegon tales (including "The Babe," about Lake Wobegon sports, and "Who Do You Think You Are?," about becoming famous in the Midwest); a gaggle of "Talk of the Town" New Yorker pieces (about a number of things, including subways and the New Iberia, Louisiana, Sugar Cane Festival); a chapbook's worth of poems (ranging from clever to cornpone); and a few short stories (e.g., "After a Fall," which transforms slapstick into metaphor, and the title story, in which a commonplace couple fall into the clutches of People magazine and celebrity). In short, Keillor has cleaned out his basement and printed everything that didn't get into his earlier books. As with Ken Kesey's Garage Sale, though, even the most discriminating reader will find the book worth the price of admission, with some change left over.
Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 0140131566
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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