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O'Brien's Desk
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You Are Here: Books About Antiques > Antique Desks > Item 35 of 67
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$0.74
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Available from Amazon
Price Last Updated : 6-25-2008
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Features
Hardcover: 296 pages
Publisher: Sunstone Press; First edition April 1, 2004
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0865344167
ISBN-13: 978-0865344167
Product Dimensions:
9 x 6.8 x 1.1 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
Toledo Blade, September 12, 2004
"an intricate mystery around real people and eventsan intriguing story of the blackmailing of a prominent judge."
Library Journal, April 2004
"ample descriptions of place flesh out the believable plot."
Reader Reviews
O'Brien's Desk is about a judge in 1923 Toledo who gets married at the age of 59 and then suffers a nervous collapse, and the attempts of his assistant and confidante in the family law courts to find out what the cause of the collapse is and how she can protect him from ever having it happen again. It sells itself as a detective story, but in many ways it's dramatised research. The judge was a real judge; the author is the wife of his real-life grandson; she has a PhD in American Literature and knows what it is to poke around in architves; she was given a set of mysterious scrapbooks by the judge's daughter, her mother-in-law, who thought she'd be interested in them. And it turned out that hidden inside the scrapbook was a real mystery. The book has a lot of strengths. It's a minutely detailed study of Toledo at the time, as modernizing forces that were at work in the nation at large played out on the local stage. It's always interesting to be reminded that social change, particularly in America, happens one local judgement at a time rather than coming from a single nationwide decision. It is filled with people who are alive in their time, who aren't looking over their shoulders aware that they're in a period novel. See Topsy Turvy for an example in film of what I'm thinking of, though Topsy Turvy I think achieved it even better. In fact, probably the best analogy is with Steven Saylor's early Roman Empire mystery books, which are likewise based on true stories and on exhaustive research. The weaknesses: really, the book is weighed down by all that research. You can't read it without realising that everything in it was painstakingly found out. A caricatured exchange from the book would have one character saying "You came on the streetcar, then?" and the other replying "Yes, thank goodness there weren't any delays like there have been on other nights this week due to power failures or, on one occasion, a pram on the line." The detail is a huge bonus, but it weighs the book down; essentially, everyone in it is a researcher and they debate the things they research, but actual living, breathing messiness never comes in to bring it to life. (For example, the judge's wife, 30 years younger than him, is a peripheral figure; didn't she care about what was happening? Was there no tension between her and the older woman who'd known him for so much longer and seemed to take such an interest in him?) It's valuable as condensed insight into local politics in the 1920s, and it's interesting family history; but it reads, fairly or unfairly, as too in thrall to the source material, and as such it just isn't quite enough fun.
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O'Brien's Desk
by Ona Russell
Available from Amazon
Price: $0.74
on 6-25-2008
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