Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Dubus, Andre (Vol. 97) - Mark Hummel (review date October-November 1991)

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Mark Hummel (review date October-November 1991)

SOURCE: "Road Maps to Sanity," in The Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 11, No. 7, October-November, 1991, p. 7.

[In the following review, Hummel discusses Dubus's tendency to focus on life's daily battles instead of its more dramatic moments in Broken Vessels.]

Since losing one leg, the use of his other, and nearly his life to a car accident in 1986, Andre Dubus has labeled himself a cripple. Then he gets on with living. Readers of Dubus are accustomed to such directness in his language; he does not use polite, political labels such as handicapped or disabled. Yet Dubus demonstrates that from his eyes, crippled is not only more accurate, it is more resonant. Anyone who studies this book will realize the power contained in words and events that might otherwise be viewed as simple or even ugly, or, more likely, as parts of our world and our lives we either fear to face or fail to...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Gene Lyons (review date 26 February 1977)
   2. Anatole Broyard (review date 20 November 1977)
   3. Gilberto Perez (essay date Winter 1980–81)
   4. William H. Pritchard (essay date Winter 1983–84)
   5. Andre Dubus with Thomas Kennedy (interview date ca. 1985)
   6. Steve Yarbrough (essay date Fall 1986)
   7. Paul Gray (review date 10 November 1986)
   8. Joseph J. Feeney (essay date 15 November 1986)
   9. Andre Dubus with Patrick H. Samway (interview date 15 November 1986)
   10. Art Seidenbaum (review date 23 November 1986)
   11. Clancy Sigal (review date 21 December 1986)
   12. Jack Sullivan (review date 11 January 1987)
   13. Ellen Lesser (review date 20 January 1987)
   14. Thomas E. Kennedy (essay date February 1987)
   15. Eva Hoffman (review date 6 November 1988)
   16. Richard Eder (review date 20 November 1988)
   17. John B. Breslin (essay date 2 December 1988)
   18. Ellen Lesser (review date 17 January 1989)
   19. Anne Tyler (review date 6 February 1989)
   20. Freddie Baveystock (review date 6-12 April 1990)
   21. Leonard Kriegel (review date 11 August 1991)
   22. Mark Hummel (review date October-November 1991)
   23. David Toolan (review date 22 November 1991)
   24. Publishers Weekly (review date 1 January 1996)
   25. Doris Lynch (review date 15 February 1996)
   26. Richard Bausch (review date 25 February 1996)
   27. Mark Shechner (review date 10 March 1996)
   28. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt (review date 14 March 1996)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright