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Vick Mickunas
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George Pelecanos starts his latest novel, "The Turnaround," in 1972. Alex Pappas is thumbing a ride to work at his father's diner in Washington, D.C.
Alex sees The Rolling Stones on their 1972 concert tour. The opening act is Stevie Wonder.
In 1972, I hitchhiked from Des Moines to Knoxville, Tenn., to catch that same tour. Pelecanos had me right there.
This nostalgia trip ends suddenly when Pelecanos brings us to the scene of a crime. Alex rides along in a car with two of his friends. They decide to drive into a black neighborhood and do something incredibly stupid. The three white youths encounter three black youths along the road, and an ugly racial incident occurs.
In the chaos that ensues we are not quite sure what happens. Somebody pulls a gun. A boy dies. Another suffers a horrific injury. That nostalgic sense of 1972 fades into the rear-view mirror like some hideous dream.
The remainder of "The Turnaround" occurs in the present day. Alex is 35 years older and he runs his father's diner now. One of his sons has recently been killed in Iraq. Alex takes his leftover desserts to the VA Hospital for the vets who are there recovering from their wounds.
"The Turnaround" presents issues that are vital to Pelecanos, who told me that "Alex is probably the most autobiographical character I've ever written."
The book is dedicated to a family friend who died in Iraq. The author's father once owned a diner in D.C.
He explained: "I've been to the VA Hospital here in D.C. I've talked to a lot of veterans who have been in previous wars including the first Gulf War. They get forgotten. These people, unless we keep an eye on the ball and just keep talking about this, will be in a sense forgotten, too, because we'll be on to the next war and the focus will be on that. But they've got to live their lives. So we have to really make sure we keep thinking about them."
While he is at the hospital, Alex encounters a man who recognizes him. He is one of the fellows who was involved in that tragic incident.
"The Turnaround" presents an object lesson in the power of redemption and the importance of how a person is raised. Pelecanos believes that "anybody who is who they are got there for a reason."
Pelecanos wrote for the popular TV series "The Wire." He told me about his latest project.
"I wrote for a year on this show called 'The Pacific.' ... We follow a group of Marines from the beginning of the war all the way through all the island campaigns to the end. That's going to be on HBO in 2010. I wrote a couple of hours of that.
"It's produced by (Steven) Spielberg and (Tom) Hanks. It's sort of a sequel to "Band of Brothers."
For Pelecanos, it's deeply personal. He said: "I did it for my father."
Book reviewer Vick Mickunas blogs daily about books at www.DaytonDailyNews.com/booknook. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com - goto
Posted by Vick Mickunas on 8/20/08; 5:56:22 PM
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California wildfires can burn out of control quickly. "Chasing Darkness," the new novel by Robert Crais, begins while a fire is burning in Laurel Canyon. LAPD cops are telling residents to evacuate.
They make a chilling discovery: a dead man with a photo album in his lap. It contains photos of murder victims. This man was once a suspect in a murder case, and the woman this man was accused of killing is pictured in the album.
This causes problems for Elvis Cole. Elvis was the private detective who once proved this man, Lionel Byrd was innocent. Finding Byrd with the incriminating photo album contradicts that proof. The LAPD declares this serial killer's case is closed.
Elvis is suspicious. He cannot believe that he freed a killer to go on killing. Elvis and his sidekick, Joe Pike, set out to prove that Byrd could not have possibly killed the women pictured in the photo album.
Fans of this series waited three years for this book. Crais has been busy with other projects. His last book, 2007's "The Watchmen," was his first stand alone novel featuring Cole's sidekick, Joe Pike, as the main character. That book was huge for Crais. He told me that "my career is classic in one way ... every book since the beginning has sold better than the one before it."
"Chasing Darkness" is brilliantly plotted. Every clue gets turned inside out. I asked Crais how he goes about writing a story that twists and turns so much that his readers are hard pressed to figure out whodunnit.
He said, "I wanted this to be a book where nothing and no one was who they seemed to be. By the time we got to the end of the book I wanted everything to be upside down from where the reader thought things were at the beginning.
"Readers love to figure out ahead of the writer who did it. Then they love to throw it up in your face," he said. "'Ah, I guessed it! I saw it coming a mile away!' It's part of the fun of reading this kind of novel — unraveling the mystery.
"So I set as a task for myself in this book. I knew it would be a plot heavy book because there were so many illusions and so many lies within lies — that was what I wanted to do here. So when I was writing the book I was very conscious of that. I was very conscious that you, the reader, you're going to be trying to figure out who really did it. And therefore, I took extra care in trying to set up red herrings and misleading
misdirections."
He certainly fooled me. - goto
Posted by Vick Mickunas on 7/19/08; 4:04:47 PM
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| til my daddy takes the T-Bird awayyy |
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"The Dawn Patrol" by Don Winslow, (Knopf, 303 pages $24).
It doesn't look like I'll be making it to the beach too often this summer. That won't stop me from reading some good beach books, though. They should be light as a summer breeze — nothing heavy or mind-numbing. Not over 1,000 pages, please.
"The Dawn Patrol" by Don Winslow is the perfect summer hybrid novel — surfer crime fiction. The Dawn Patrol are surfers at Pacific Beach in San Diego. They are Boone Daniels, Hang Twelve, Dave the Love God, Johnny Banzai, High Tide and Sunny Day.
They speak "Surfbonics," a surfer language with expressions like "epic macking crunchy." As the book begins a huge storm is coming in from the Pacific and the Dawn Patrol is excited at the prospect of surfing monster waves that the storm will cause.
Daniels is a former cop turned private eye. Unfortunately, a case has just come his way. He would rather surf than work. Too bad — an exotic dancer just took a nose dive from a hotel balcony. Did she jump? Or was she pushed? An attorney named Petra hires Boone to find out what really happened. As one could expect in this kind of book in this particular environment, Petra is drop dead gorgeous.
This potential murder is a downer but the "The Dawn Patrol" stays loose. This is the beach, after all. Boone is annoyed by this search for a murderer. He prefers looking for killer waves. Surfing always takes priority over working.
Boone and Petra cruise in the Boonemobile, his decrepit van, looking for clues. When we reach the conclusion of this summery read, we do encounter some heavy crimes. Even so, Winslow paints with light strokes. Bad stuff happens but hey, look at that wave. It's time to surf.
Winslow is a former private eye. His passion for surfing pulsates throughout this novel, surging with the steady rhythm of breakers crashing into Ocean Beach. The big storm comes in and Sunny Day gets her shot at the massive surf. Even if you have never surfed before when you catch the wave of Winslow's prose you'll feel the thrill.
"She's in the green room, totally inside the wave. There is nothing else, just her and the wave, her in the wave, her wave, her life." Onlookers fear they won't see her come out of it again.
"Then a blast of white water shoots sideways out of the tube and the woman shoots out, still on her feet, her left hand touching the back of the wave, and the crowd breaks into a cheer." Inspired writing is so exciting.
It gets even better. "She's high in the air, high over the wave, and as she jumps off the board, she does a full somersault before she hits the water on the far side of the wave."
So you can't make it to the beach? No worries. Don Winslow brings the beach right to you with "The Dawn Patrol." It's "epic macking crunchy." - goto
Posted by Vick Mickunas on 7/14/08; 12:15:01 AM
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King biographer latest Literary Peace Prize honoree
By Laura Dempsey
Staff Writer
Sunday, May 18, 2008
A core group of Daytonians have faith that great writing can change lives, having made it their mission to honor writers whose work "broadens readers' view of the world, addresses issues of controversy and shows the way to understanding," according to Sharon Rab.
Rab, founder and co-chair of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, steers a committee that seeks out authors for what's become a highly prestigious Literary Peace Prize, an outgrowth of the Dayton Peace Prize, organized in honor of the Dayton Peace Accords that ended the Balkans conflict in 1995.
"We believe that writing can and will influence the course of world events, and we want to ensure that those exceptional writers whose works point to peaceful resolution of conflict are honored," she said.
To that end, Rab and her committee have, since 2006, honored two writers each year — one fiction, one nonfiction — who meet that ideal.
They've also seen fit to single out writers for Lifetime Achievement Awards: Studs Terkel in 2006 and Elie Weisel in 2007. This year, the committee has chosen Taylor Branch as a Lifetime Achievement recipient. Branch's trilogy of "America in the King Years" has already won several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He's also written two other works of nonfiction and one novel.
Though the Lifetime award has been given each year since the Literary Peace Prize was founded, Rab says it will be presented only when an outstanding candidate is nominated. The idea came from Vick Mickunas, a Dayton Daily News book columnist and WYSO radio show host. Nominations are solicited from several sources, including the board's college and university consortium, publishers and the public.
"The discussions among the committee members have been tremendous," said Brian Conniff, former English department chair at the University of Dayton, who chairs the Lifetime Achievement Committee. "We have really struggled, from a variety of perspectives, to recognize excellent writing that addresses peace in a broad sense.
"One reflection of the complexity of this process is that we already have three writers working in different genres. Taylor Branch will be a particularly interesting addition, in this sense, because his life's work deals with the biography of a major figure working for peace, and struggles — successfully, I think — with finding a way to tell King's story in a broad historical context, in a manner that can engage a wide audience.
"This kind of writing, I think, is one way of working for peace," Conniff added.
Having decided to honor Branch with a Lifetime Achievement Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize committee is busy working through the nominations in the fiction and nonfiction categories.
Branch and the winners of those categories will receive their awards at a formal Schuster Center ceremony on Sept. 28. For information about the prizes and the ceremony, visit www.daytonliterarypeaceprize.org. - goto
Posted by Vick Mickunas on 5/24/08; 1:38:56 PM
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| down in the briar patch... |
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"Knockemstiff," by Donald Ray Pollock (Doubleday, 206 pages, $23).
Donald Ray Pollock grew up 13 miles southwest of Chillicothe in the holler known as Knockemstiff, Ross County, Ohio. He spent 32 years toiling in the paper mills at Chillicothe. He really wanted to be a writer. Dreams can come true.
Pollock has written 18 short stories about Knockemstiff. The actual community has faded away. You would never know that from reading Pollock's literary debut, a collection aptly called "Knockemstiff."
In Pollock's fanciful imagination, this hardscrabble swath of Appalachia in south central Ohio is gritty and nasty and downright terrifying. His version of Knockemstiff is peopled by losers. Druggies, grifters, rapists, thieves, perverts, killers — every manner of dead-end situation ricochets across these pages with the lethal force of flaming cars skittering toward that looming abutment. No happy endings should be expected.
These stories detonate. Pollock's readers become horrified spectators of tragedy and disaster. We are mortified by the violence yet, strangely thrilled. There is that sense of being a voyeur observing repulsive but fascinating behavior. Pollock writes with incendiary verbal pyromania.
The first story, "Real Life," sets the tone for what is to come. A boy remembers. "My father showed me how to hurt a man one August night at the Torch Drive-in when I was 7 years old. It was the only thing he was ever any good at."
Most of these stories seethe with an undercurrent of violence. Many of the characters are hopeless, ignorant or cruel. In "Hair's Fate" a sad youth named Daniel reflects that "when people in town said inbred, what they really meant was lonely. Daniel liked to pretend that anyway. He needed the long hair. Without it, he was nothing but a creepy country stooge from Knockemstiff, Ohio."
Pollock's hillbilly ne'er-do-wells will strike some readers as politically incorrect stereotypes. If you are offended by prose that punches you right in the nose, you should avoid this book. Deeply unhappy people take drugs and abuse each other in this tortured fiction. "Daniel tried to laugh, but that had always been too hard for him. He'd never had anything to celebrate, not once in his whole life."
The tale "Pills" descends into darkness. "Wanda tended bar at Hap's and sold the black beauties on the side. The hilljacks loved them because a three-dollar capsule made it possible to drink four times as much and still miss the telephone poles on the way home."
Speed kills. Some guys don't miss the poles. "Knockemstiff" is populated by the damaged specimens who crashed through windshields and survived. Another unlucky fellow becomes a vegetable after a drug binge. The unfortunate caretakers of these sad cases are driven to their own extremes of behavior.
One character carries fish sticks around in her purse. Another overdoses on steroids trying to win a bodybuilding title, Mr. South Ohio. The freak show that is "Knockemstiff" unspools with brutal precision. Donald Ray Pollock is a keen observer of the human condition. This is a fantastic debut.
Book reviewer Vick Mickunas blogs daily about books at www.DaytonDailyNews.com/booknook. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com. - goto
Posted by Vick Mickunas on 4/8/08; 12:20:25 PM
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"On Empire — America, War, and Global Supremacy," by Eric Hobsbawm (Pantheon, 97 pages, $20)
Our national tragedy of 9/11 reverberated around the world. There was great sympathy and support for America following the attacks. That favorable view of the U.S. has now evaporated.
Sen. John McCain just made a trip to Europe. The New York Times reported: "It offered him the chance to test his hope that he could repair America's tattered reputation by shifting course on some of the policies that have alienated its allies, in areas like global warming and torture. But he is making his foray even as he embraces what much of the world sees as the most hated remnant of the Bush presidency: the war in Iraq."
We have alienated the world — do we care? A book by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, "On Empire - America, War, and Global Supremacy" analyzes our loss of good will.
Hobsbawm states in his preface that these essays "reflect the specific international concerns of that period, which was dominated by the decision of the U.S. government in 2001 to assert a single-handed world hegemony, denouncing hitherto accepted international conventions, reserving its right to launch wars of aggression or other military operations whenever it wanted to, and actually doing so."
He thinks our pretext for invading was false. "The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001 were U.S. military operations not undertaken for humanitarian reasons, though justified to humanitarian public opinion on the ground that they removed some rather unsavory regimes. But for 9/11, not even America would have regarded the situation in either country as calling for immediate invasion."
Are we merely a super-bully? Hobsbawm asserts that "in all these cases, armed intervention has come from foreign states with far superior military power and resources. In none of them has it so far produced stable solutions." Afghanistan is a mess. So is Iraq.
President Bush declared his "war on terror." Hobsbawm suggests, "Let us resist the rhetoric of irrational fear." He finds the terminology flawed. "Except as a metaphor, there can be no such thing as a war against terror or terrorism, but only against particular political actors who use what is a tactic, not a program."
Our nation pours billions of dollars into war as our economy is melting down. The author cannot comprehend how this "megalomaniac American policy since 9/11" led the United States to a place where "military strength underlines the economic vulnerability of a United States whose enormous trade deficit is maintained by Asian investors, whose economic interest in supporting a falling dollar is rapidly diminishing."
Our American reality check has just been returned for insufficient funds. Our neighbors don't understand what we are trying to do. Hobsbawm blames our government. "Frankly, I can't make sense of what has happened in the United States since 9/11 that enabled a group of political crazies to realize long-held plans for an unaccompanied solo performance of world supremacy. I believe it indicates a growing crisis within American
society."
Book reviewer Vick Mickunas blogs daily about books at www.DaytonDailyNews.com/booknook. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com - goto
Posted by Vick Mickunas on 4/1/08; 10:59:41 AM
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"Olive Kitteridge," by Elizabeth Strout (Random House, 270 pages, $25)
Olive Kitteridge retired from her job teaching high school mathematics in Crosby, a small town on the coast of Maine. Her husband, Henry, is the town's pharmacist. Christopher, their only child, is a podiatrist on the verge of moving to California.
Elizabeth Strout's novel "Olive Kitteridge" establishes those opening storylines. Olive then unifies 13 stories that scan across the town, zooming in on different scenes, each vignette deftly drawn in brushstrokes ranging from bold to subtle. In some, Olive drives the action. In others, she is barely a whisper, a fleeting memory.
Olive is complicated. She carries herself with a "quiet anger." Her father had taken his own life. In one story, she notices a former student sitting in a car parked near the ocean. He left town years ago after some family troubles. Olive hops into his car and they talk about the emotional turmoil that families can go through.
She tells him about her father. "No note," Mrs. Kitteridge said. "Oh, Mother had such a hard time with that no-note business. She thought the least he could have done was leave a note, the way he did if he'd walked to the grocery store."
Strout's characters are nuanced. Some are fragile as eggshells. Angela O'Meara plays the piano at a cocktail bar in town. "Her face revealed itself too clearly in a kind of simple expectancy no longer appropriate for a woman her age. There was, in the tilt of her head, the slight messiness of the very bright hair, the open gaze of her blue eyes, a quality that could, in other circumstances, make people uncomfortable."
Many of these people are struggling. The piano player drinks. The Kitteridges can't understand why their son moved to California after they built him a house. Some are lonely. Others, bored. The summer people arrive and treat the locals with condescension. Strout, a native of Maine, knows her rocky terrain.
Young people have their troubles. One is dying from an eating disorder. Another has been deserted by her bridegroom on their wedding day. Perhaps all this sounds depressing? Strout imbues each tale with shades of tenderness that linger just beneath the surface of some jagged emotions.
No matter how bad you think your life is the guy across the street probably has it worse. Humor and heartbreak are often inseparable: "more gratifying, however, was the fact that for Olive and Henry the story of Bill and Bunny's offspring was worse than their own."
While life in rustic Crosby is often rather placid there are some shocking events that do occur. Olive finds herself in some strange situations. As we get to know her over the course of these 13 stories, we begin to admire her hard headed determination.
In one haunting story, "Tulips," Olive encounters Louise, a recluse. " 'You've probably thought of killing yourself.' Louise said this serenely, as though discussing a recipe for lemon pie."
The book ends in an emotional climax that is unexpected and delightful. - goto
Posted by Vick Mickunas on 3/23/08; 12:08:44 AM
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Gene Logsdon lives at what he describes as a "small-scale experimental farm" in north-central Ohio. He raises sheep, cultivates a variety of crops and writes books — more than two dozen thus far.
He imparts his wisdom in memoirs like "You Can Go Home Again" and "Adventures of a Contrary Life." A passion for farm ponds led him to write "The Pond Lovers."
A real Renaissance Man, Logsdon even writes fiction, most recently "The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of the Farming Life." Set in an Ohio farming community, it traces the lives of two young men, Ben and Emmet. In 1940, as the story begins, they are embarking on very different paths.
Ben's life is the central focus here. He is a husbandman, a follower of the old ways. He loves farming. His character is clearly a mouthpiece for the author's viewpoints on agriculture. Ben's family is poor. His father, Nat, a German veteran of World War I, came to this country after the war and scraped together the money to buy a farm by distilling moonshine whiskey.
Emmet, Ben's best friend, is a spoiled rich kid. His family owns a huge farm and the bank. Their town bears his family name. WWII changes his luck. Emmet goes to war and experiences horrors.
Meanwhile, back on the farm, Ben is figuring out how he can come up with the cash to buy his own place. Logsdon weaves a complex tapestry of the intertwined relationships in this rural community during the next 45 years. He writes what he knows. His farmers shake the dust off their boots at the local cafe and bemoan commodity prices or the weather.
They battle over land at farm auctions. They gossip. They plot. They worry. Farmers are the biggest gamblers in the world. A record harvest usually translates into low prices. As they struggle to get an edge or even to make a profit, they see their margins dwindle, shredded by costs of chemicals and equipment.
While the farms around him get larger, Ben, the contrary farmer, spurns the new techniques. He plows with horses, fertilizes with manure and refuses to borrow money. His neighbors abandon their livestock to focus on raising grain. Ben insists on keeping his dairy herd.
"The Last of the Husbandmen" reads like a parable. Emmet is the grasshopper, fiddling with crazy schemes that lead to disaster. Ben is the ant, steady and industrious, storing away the fruit of his labors to keep him happy and warm all winter. Logsdon addresses his readers through Ben.
This uplifting book had a few surprises. A scary episode with the Ku Klux Klan morphs into slapstick. A murder occurs during a land dispute, and Logsdon pulls out all the stops for a drunken funeral that would do Lake Wobegon proud.
Vick Mickunas blogs about books daily at www.DaytonDailyNews.com/booknook. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com - goto
Posted by Vick Mickunas on 3/18/08; 1:10:31 AM
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Review
"Grace (Eventually) Thoughts on Faith," by Anne Lamott (Riverhead Books, 253 pages, $14).
Anne Lamott wrote about her struggles, revelations and satisfactions in books such as "Operating Instructions" (1993) and "Bird by Bird" (1994). Her gift for introspection veers from the confessional to the hilarious.
Lamott finds solace in her Christianity. She has written widely about her faith, most recently in "Grace (Eventually) Thoughts on Faith."
She begins this collection by declaring "there is not much truth being told in the world. There never was. This has proven to be a major disappointment to some of us. When I was a child, I thought grown-ups and teachers knew the truth, because they told me they did. It took me years to discover that the first step in finding out the truth is to begin unlearning almost everything adults had taught me, and to start doing all the things they'd told me not to do."
In her essay "The Muddling Glory of God" she realizes "that whenever I want to either binge or diet, it means that there is some part of me that is deeply afraid." She embarks on a quest for her preferred painkiller, an apple fritter.
"Cheese Love" celebrates Lamott's difficult relationship with her mother. "At Death's Window" delivers a poignant view of assisted suicide. "The Born" tackles that incredibly delicate topic, abortion.
She waxes poetic: "If my heart were a garden, it would be in bloom with roses and wrinkly Indian poppies and wild flowers. There would be two unmarked tracts of scorched earth, and scattered headstones covered with weeds and ivy and moss, a functioning compost pile, great tangles of blackberry bushes, and some piles of trash I've meant to haul away for years."
A recurring theme is body image. She told me that "we look in the mirror and the trillions of dollars of advertising that supports a culture has convinced us that who we see in the mirror is who we are. And if we don't look like Drew Barrymore it's like our value as women and humans is really sketchy. There's a lot of exhortation to breathe through the reflection looking back at you and get on with it; the richest possible experience of this one precious life you've been given."
She hopes that women really see in the mirror and "it's a real deep kind of freedom to realize that its not you. It's like you at a certain age in a split second in the reflection, but its not you. It's not the juicy, wild, deep, profound YOU. It's just this ridiculous funhouse mirror that the brainwashing of the culture has convinced you could be improved."
It took her years to comprehend that "the culture convinces us that the road to happiness is doing well, getting 'A's, being a super sports star, keeping your weight down, staying much younger looking than you really are — that all of it, this external accomplishment will fill you from the inside out with value and restoration. And it's such a lie."
Book reviewer Vick Mickunas blogs daily about books at www.DaytonDailyNews.com/booknook. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com. - goto
Posted by Vick Mickunas on 3/4/08; 1:07:34 PM
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City of the Sun by David Levien, Doubleday, 310 pages, $25
When I was 12 years old, I got my first job delivering newspapers. I'd awaken at 3 in the morning to carry the Des Moines Register. Those were simpler times. My parents didn't worry about me.
In 1982, a 12-year-old newsboy was delivering the Des Moines Register. Later that morning, his parents started getting phone calls from their son's customers. They hadn't gotten their newpapers. Johnny Gosch never came home.
David Levien opens his new novel, "City of the Sun," with this nightmarish premise. Jamie Gabriel is a 12-year-old newsboy in Indianapolis. He rides off on his bicycle to deliver his paper route. He vanishes.
A few weeks ago I reviewed "Beautiful Children" by Charles Bock and noted that there is now an entire sub-genre of fiction that I call "missing kid lit." "City of the Sun" is another example.
Jamie Gabriel's parents are distraught. The police file away the case as another runaway situation. The Gabriels hire a private investigator, Frank Behr. Levien's hard-boiled Behr is a retired detective haunted by his past.
He is reluctant to take the case. He tells the Gabriels that "if this leads anywhere, it'll be to a horrible place. And you're not prepared for it." He tries to dissuade them. "I may seem like a regular guy," Behr says evenly, "but it's a mask."
Behr dreads where this case will go. He surfs the Internet for clues about pedophiles who might have been involved in Jamie's kidnapping. Jamie's father, Paul, insists on tagging along with Behr as he stakes out potential suspects.
Paul Gabriel is consumed by guilt. "It's my fault, you know. I always believed in a work ethic. That it wouldn't serve him well to have it too easy. It was my idea, his job, delivering papers."
Together, the distraught father and the emotionally wounded detective follow this jagged highway to the darkest possible evil. Levien stokes the suspense with steaming shots of adrenaline. "City of the Sun" churns along with a nerve-bending force to a violent climax. I was left gasping.
Levien is best known as a screenwriter. This novel unspools with a deliberate, cinematic precision. His private eye, Frank Behr reconstructs the crime scene. He finds a witness who provides vital clues. It becomes a fascinating piece of detective work, a chain of obscure bits of information that eventually exposes the culprits and reveals their crimes.
The tunnel that leads to the truth takes this determined duo into the underworld. "The night was dark black. Whatever street lamps there were in the town must have been uniformly broken or extinguished at a set time, as none of then threw any light."
We seek the light. I worked for a time in an office building in Des Moines. The mother of the missing newsboy worked in my building. One day by chance the two of us were in the elevator together. She looked at me. I'll never forget the look in her eyes.
Book reviewer Vick Mickunas blogs daily about books at www.DaytonDailyNews.com/booknook. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com. - goto
Posted by Vick Mickunas on 2/25/08; 1:50:04 PM
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