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...