Book Review

By Derryll White

Parker, Robert B. (1999).  Family Honor.

It is the age of Trump and the world appears to be shuddering, struggling to come to grips with a new reality.  The stock market is in chaos and immigrants are in hiding.  It is a very good time to step aside for a moment and embrace an older reality, which Robert B. Parker does exceedingly well.  It is 25 years ago, just before the new millennium, and Sunny Randall, a Boston artist and private detective, is trying to resolve how to be an independent, fiercely self-reliant woman in a man’s world.

Parker gives the reader everything we are currently stewing over – crooked politicians, criminals and controllers, strong gay men, greed, abused teenagers and women insisting very strongly that they be treated as willful human beings.

In all of this the author has the great ability to make the reader stop and smile – at the weirdness of our current predicament and at the assessment of ourselves on this peculiar, perverted path that is life.

Robert B. Parker had hope 25 years ago, and he gives the reader hope now.  It is always fulfilling to embrace the pause that memory provides.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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