Word: kantor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...NOISE OF THEIR WINGS-MacKinlay Kantor-Coward-McCann...
...painful lore of the passenger pigeons deserves a poet but has attracted MacKinlay Kantor. The Noise of Their Wings, laid in Florida of 1937, revolves around the obsession of an aged millionaire, who hankers for a living pair of passenger pigeons. The main role, however, devolves on the millionaire's old friend, an ornithologist, who is Author Kantor's poetic mouthpiece. In a series of melodramatic disasters which involve half the main characters, as well as all the pigeons, the ornithologist is everywhere at once, confirming his mystical foreboding that no good can come of the millionaire...
...Author Kantor's story is teasing and ingenious rather than effective. As in his Civil War novels (Long Remember, Arouse and Beware, etc.), MacKinlay Kantor has a graphic sense of the U. S. past, writes good descriptive narrative, and creates an atmosphere of tension. But in The Noise of Their Wings he goes lame shuttling between the past and present, and most of his vitality appears to have been exhausted in devising a modern plot. The characters in The Noise of Their Wings resemble real people about as closely as the Smithsonian's well-stuffed passenger pigeon resembles...
...best. Reginald Marsh had one of his riotous confusions at Coney Island, this time entitled George T. Tilyou's Steeplechase Park. Sculptor Mahonri Young offered a bronze boxer. There were able nudes by Isabel Bishop and Alexander Brook and a study of a black parasol by Morris Kantor that was possibly the best still life in the show...
...hounds run in Missouri. Practicing one of the oldest U. S. sports, their masters sit around bonfires in convenient clearings, following the hunt of their bugle-voiced foxhounds by ear alone. Of this breed was Bugle Ann, a real bugler, rare even among its own kind, about which MacKinlay Kantor wrote his short best-selling novel, played in the picture by a prize bitch from the pack of Sheriff Tom Bash of Kansas City, Mo. Bitch, to be sure, was a word Spring Davis (Lionel Barrymore) would not allow used for his lady-dog. He believed in general that...