Word: boye
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Safekeeping, a witty, Wodehousian gavotte from the confines of an English boys' school to the streets of Harlem, with several beguiling stops between, Mcdonald records the travails of a small boy, heir to a dukedom, who is orphaned during the London blitz and sent off to the uncertain care of a sodden New York City tabloid reporter. Within weeks the boy becomes the target of a Mafia hit man, thereby allowing the author to mix sociology and satire, goofy narrative and authentic terror...
...omits Author Joseph Hansen's recurring sleuth, Insurance Investigator Dave Brandstetter, but unfolds in his usual seedy gay Southern California milieu. The central character, Darryl Cutler, is a rogue undone by his few fleeting moments of trust and devotion. A former male prostitute, he becomes infatuated with a blond boy as pretty and venal as he used to be. Cutler knows that he is being used. Even so, his sexual itch drives him to theft, fraud and murder. Each crime makes him more subject to blackmail. The tale moves toward its climax with a mounting sense of catastrophe...
...December 1941, within a few days of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Nazis began gassing Jews and Gypsies at a camp in Chelmno, Poland. More than 150,000 died there; two survived, and both offer their soul-scarred witness in Shoah. One of them, Simon Srebnik, was a boy of 13 at the time. Returning to Chelmno, he visits townspeople who were once enchanted by his beautiful singing voice. They also remember the screams of Jews locked in the local church before being taken away. At Treblinka, site of the Nazis' most efficient gas chambers, villagers recall standing...
...picture radio." He has, in fact, been there twice. The first time he accompanied a friend whose mother worked with Oscar the Amorous Octopus, a titillating sideshow at the amusement park. He returned on a family pass that he had won for his fawning entry in a typical-American-boy contest. The essay is heavy with irony. It also introduces a writer who knows what it takes to get on the bestseller list: "He roots for his home team in football and baseball but also plays sports himself. He reads all the time. It's all right...
World's Fair is not a happy book. The dreariness of the '30s and the strains of family life appear to have had a bad effect on Edgar's style. He is either too terse or verbosely academic, as if the boy grew up to be a literary critic rather than a novelist. Evocations of his time and place are frequently bloated with pretentious prose: "In my own consciousness I was not a child. When I was alone, not subject to the demands of the world, I had the opportunity to be the aware sentient being I knew myself...