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do the other part-time Nikawanauts we encounter. But this is not a dull book, and even with its shortcomings it is a remarkable one. Heat-Moon is a masterful stylist whose thought is always worth following. Near the end of his journey he considers with some irony the inevitable implications of moving water for the passage of time: "Brevity does not make life meaningless , but forgetting does. Of the gifts of rivers, none was greater than their making our time upon them indelible , or nearly indelible as the old pictographs." This book is also a gift, one that freshens our memories and deserves its own indelible place in American travel literature. (CW) A Night at the Y by Robert Garner McBrearty John Daniel and Company, 1999, 126 pp., $12 Robert Garner McBrearty's first collection of stories is about longing, about imagining, about resisting what confines or debilitates. These stories delight and surprise as well as disturb. We are touched by how human and real they are. It's the deadening-down of life, the loss of vigor and vitality, that McBrearty's characters tend to resist. An actor stuck with creep parts begins to improvise good-guy parts, against the wishes of the director and writers. A dishwasher develops a rare artistic conception of his menial work. He imagines various dishwashing techniques: a modern European style, a Greco-Roman approach, an impressionistic technique. A married man nearing forty yearns for unfettered freedom—to run with the bulls in Mexico. The prospect of a yellow "starter home" and suburban living causes him to run for his life, though he doesn't get far. Ralph, of the title story, also longs for exotic Mexico, for a time twenty years ago when, as a single man, he saved a four-year-old boy's life by rushing out in front of a ferocious bull and gaining the admiration of the crowd, becoming an instant hero. Is there such possibility for heroism, for romance—for risk—here at the Y, where he moonlights at a harassing front-desk job? Yes, though it's heroism of a somewhat different kind. A rather troubling piece in this collection , "The Things I Don't Know About," deals with the narrator's mother's emphysema and her wish that her fiction-writing son will capture some Western family history and jazz it up a bit. While this story shows McBrearty's typical humor and wit in the "jazzing up," it is still quite a departure from the rest of the collection . What we feel in this final tale is how McBrearty is at heart a serious writer—and a compassionate one. This closing piece, touching in its sympathetic response to the dying mother, helps bring into relief the seriousness of other stories, including the title piece, where the compassion of the Y worker becomes abundantly clear if we missed it before. Whether ifs a would-be hellraiser with a couple of "dulled out" old pals in tow (one a family man, the other asthmatic), a Western outlaw attempting to reform his evil ways of drinking , whoring, looting; a young boy who fancies himself a judo master; or a stockbroker seeking a spiritual "unfolding " through the Consciousness 186 · The Missouri Review Church, McBrearty's characters are thoroughly real and almost always likeable. The author's genial wit and his acute sense of what it means to be human make this book a good read— and a noteworthy debut. (JS) Personal Injuries by Scott Turow Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999, 403 pp., $27 When the Internal Revenue Service begins to question personal-injury attorney Robbie Feaver about a secret bank account, the stage is set for an elaborate sting operation that reaches deep into the Kindle County Courthouse . It's familiar turf for Scott Turow, who revisits his fictionalized Cook County, Illinois, for the fifth time in this novel. Personal Injuries draws on Turov/s experience with Operation Greylord, a full-scale purging of the Chicago criminal justice system that took place during his tenure as assistant U.S. attorney. In methodical, pointby -point fashion, Turow lays out the evidence, using blue-blooded defense attorney and former bar president...

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