The King of Kings County

by Whitney Terrell

Book Overview

The second novel by Whitney Terrell, author of The Good Lieutenant-- an engrossing portrait of a Kansas City family's suspect pursuit of fortune. In The Huntsman, a first novel hailed by Esquire as... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143037692
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 361 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Great book and a great writer

If you're from Kansas City or have spent any meaningful amount of time there you must read this book. It is a great story that is apparently loosely (or maybe tightly) based on events that happened at a time when the city was really changing. Whitney Terrell is a fantastic writer that makes this a book that you can sit down and read in one sitting -- very engaging, funny and definitely intersting.

Recommended

In Joel Wendland's interview with Russell Banks in the online journal "Political Affairs: Marxist Thought Online", respected author Banks recommends Whitney Terrell's writing. Terrell's pointed novels embrace the thought of black writers such as Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois. His books are in the tradition of the novels of the "naturalists" of the first half of the twentieth century, such as Richard Wright's "Native Son". (For good chapters on the literary thought of DuBois and Wright, see Cedric Robinson's "Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition".) Other parallels include the indictment of the ruling class and attendant class struggles of works like Theodore Dreiser's "American Tragedy", as well as the anti-racist socialism of novelists of the forties and fifties, such as John B. Sanford (nee Julian Shapiro)'s "The People from Heaven", and Alfred Maund's "The Big Boxcar". Terrell's second book, "The King of King's County" presents a fictional portrayal of the segregation of our major cities, nestled neatly in the well written story of a young man's experience growing up in Kansas City in the fifties and sixties. Terrel's views on suburban development and inner city ghettos echo the searing censure of Jack London's novel "The Iron Heel". Readers of "The King of King's County" might want some quick historical background on the causes that produced modern segregation and the desertion of America's inner cities. A short article that details these causes, and would help in understanding the novel's setting, is found online in the Fannie Mae Foundation's publication, Winter 1999 Vol. 1 Issue 4. The article reports a survey that asked an independent association of leading urban scholars to rank the ten key factors that made our cities what they are today. They listed the Top Ten Influences on the American Metropolis of the Past 50 Years as: 1. The 1956 Interstate Highway Act and the Dominance of the Automobile. 2. Federal Housing Administration Mortgage Financing and Subdivision Regulation. 3. De-Industrialization of Central Cities. 4. Federal Urban Renewal: Downtown Redevelopment and Public Housing Projects (1949 and subsequent Housing Acts). 5. Levittown (Federally Financed Mass-Produced Suburban Tract Houses). 6. Racial Segregation and Job Discrimination in Cities and Suburbs. 7. Enclosed Shopping Malls. 8. Sunbelt-Style Sprawl. 9. Air Conditioning. 10. Urban Riots of the 1960s. (fanniemaefoundation.org "The American Metropolis at Century's End".) Many of these elements are fictionally represented in 'The King of King's County', and provide the historical context for the story. Recommended.

ill-literate

I don't know what book this last guy is reviewing, but it's not the one I read. The book I read is about kid who grows up with a crazy father, whose school friends are mobsters, and whose girlfriend accidentally (on purpose?) does something terrible that changes all their lives. It's about high school football, and fathers and sons, and the pain of discovering that your father isn't all you thought he might be. Yeah, it's about real estate, too -- but it's hard to imagine why anyone would want to defend the practices of suburban real estate developers as they are, accurately from my experience, described here. Block busting was a real thing. So was red lining. So were racial covenants. And those were about race -- developers used them to keep African-Americans out of white neighborhoods. The previous post is the first person I've read who seemed to think it is "naïve"(!?) to criticize developers for using these racist methods -- except for the first post, or rant, on this site. Are these people serious? Or are they the same person, which is what it looks like to me. What's good about this book is that it doesn't have a thesis. The characters -- both black and white -- don't agree about what's right and wrong. The narrator of this book, Jack Acheson, is funny and curious and tender. He's broken up by his love for his father and his city -- both the good things they do and the bad. And he doesn't insult the reader by describing this city as it ought to be, but rather as it really was. Skip the politics. Read this book for the story. It's about imagination -- and that cuts across everything.

King of K.C.

Whitney Terrell's characters always exist in a context. In this novel, for every important character the reader knows that character's class, income, race, education and (usually) family. These frameworks help determine what the character thinks and how he acts. To me, at least, this is refreshing; for decades American writing hs been dominated by an interiority that has become monotonous. Many of our novelists' characters exist in a void. Money, for instance, is almost never mentioned, as if the pursuit of it didn't use up nearly half the waking hours of the average adult. Terrell is one of the few contemporary novelists who writes about human beings in something like the way they actually live. To say that the characters reflect the way we live in this country is not to imply that they or the plot have the humdrum, quotidian quality that permeates most of our lives. The King of King's County is full of quirks and odd little twists. The characters are credible partly because they are set in an authentic, persuasive social context. This aspect of Terrell's writing sets him less with his contemporaries and more alongside the 19th-century novelists, with their wider canvases and larger and more varied casts of characters, and their concerns with social issues. This is not to criticize other modern novelists, but to point out that Terrell fills a gap in our literature that has gone unplugged too long. In addition to a convincing narrative ground, the book is extremely well crafted. The plot is credible, evolving at a consistent rate, neither too fast nor too slow. The story is established in long scenes and perfectly joined chapters that are worked out in detail, but which rarely drag. The cast of characters is large, but the reader never loses track of who's who, and the book doesn't feel crowded. The prose invites the reader into the story. Occasionally that prose is downright beautiful, though it doesn't strut and preen and show itself off. There are, of course, weaknesses - after all, it's a novel, and no perfect novel exists. There are occasional anachronisms (two teenagers using the word "upgrade", a recent coinage). And the son is more blunt with his father than sons were in those days. The dialogue is occasionally too literary, so that it doesn't sound like real people having a real conversation. And the characters often talk too much like each other. But these are minor, occasional problems, and compared to the book's virtues, they are mostly insignificant. Terrell has the complete novelist's toolkit: characterization, plot, and all the rest, and he works not at the apprentice or journeyman level, but close to that of a master. If you're looking for a substantial, serious novel, well-written but not stuffy, sometimes even light-hearted; if you enjoy a cast of interesting characters ranging from mobsters to socialites; and if you're open to some shrewd observations on the remaking of American cities by business and political forces, then

urban blight

Those of us who live in blighted cities (aren't all large cities blighted) can gain perspective by reading Terrell's King of Kings County. He gives us a plausible view of how are inner cities got the way they did. A quick read and entertaining look at families and dynasties. Terrell's dialogue is witty and dry. Jack is a great foil to Alton's buffoonery. I found this book a real pleasure. The subject matter is relevant and shows us how cities got in the dire straights that they are in today. New Orleans is a perfect example. Once you move the tax base out of a city the people left behind have little resources and are only steps from immense disaster.