Word: mccalls
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Music (Doubleday; 628 pages; $27.50) jumps onto your lap like a large shaggy dog that will do anything to get your attention. It's friendly but still has teeth, like The Prince of Tides with its theme of family violence barely concealed in Southern blarney. Beach Music's Jack McCall has his own troublesome clan in South Carolina. His father the Judge is a brilliant drunk. Mom is a former striptease dancer, feisty cancer patient and savior of threatened loggerhead turtles. McCall's brothers include a hermit who lives in a tree house. Friends are also conspicuously memorable: a former...
Conroy's expansive storytelling style tends to disarm criticism. But he goes too far when the Holocaust bears down on Beach Music like a runaway cement barge. First, McCall's Jewish wife jumps off a bridge after having her father's concentration-camp number tattooed on her arm; she wants to join Europe's murdered Jews. Conroy later inserts long sections about pogroms in czarist Russia, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi death camps to explain the suicide. They don't. The historical carpetbagging doesn't add much of anything to the novel except a few unnecessarily grisly shocks...
What sets these books apart from similar works by less talented writers is their refusal to oversimplify or offer easy prescriptions for the underclass dilemma. As McCall acknowledges, "My background and those of my running partners don't fit all the convenient theories, and the problems among us are more complex than something we can throw jobs, social programs or more policemen at." That maddening complexity, these two powerful books make clear, keeps it nearly as difficult for young blacks to free themselves from bondage today as it was in Douglass's time...
...Allan McCall...
...reason the '50s was called the silent generation was because its collective maw was too full to say anything. The "togetherness" theme played endlessly by McCall's magazine was a merchandiser's dream: the family as a consuming unit. Not everyone was satisfied. Halberstam's dissenters include Sloan Wilson, who popularized the rat race in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Betty Friedan, whose The Feminine Mystique, along with Goody Pincus' birth-control pill, challenged traditional relations between men and women...