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GHOST

Name: GHOST
Author: Alan Lightman
ISBN: 978-0-375-42169-3

by Alan Lightman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2007

A weighty issue, but a wisp of a novel.

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A guy sees a ghost. This leads to an evaluation of the supernatural in Lightman’s low-key fifth novel (Reunion, 2003, etc.).

When 42-year-old David Kurzweil loses his job at a bank, he goes to work at a mortuary. In the so-called slumber room, where relatives view their loved ones, David sees “a thing near a dead body. A vapor…It seemed alive. It had…intelligence. It looked at me.” Within seconds it’s gone. David is a regular guy, and we never doubt his honesty, though his account is generally greeted with skepticism. His boss Martin, the mortuary director, gently suggests he see a shrink. His story gets into the local paper, and David is visited by two emissaries from the Society for the Second World. They don’t seem like kooks, so David agrees to be the subject of an experiment which will test his openness to the nonmaterial world. The investigator, Dr. Tettlebeim, is pleased with the results, but David’s old friend Ronald, a university chemistry professor, thinks Tettlebeim’s claims of David’s special powers are absurd and should be denounced. David feels caught in the middle; he could do without the attention. After all, he does have a life of his own, though not much of one. It’s been eight years since his wife Bethany divorced him, but David’s lonely bachelor life has looked up since he started dating Ellen, a librarian, and his mortuary job, ghost aside, has proved surprisingly fulfilling. He enjoys working for the tender-hearted Martin, who has become a father figure (his own father died when he was eight). This should be fertile ground for teacher/physicist Lightman, best-known for the lightly worn erudition of Einstein’s Dreams (1993), and indeed he is scrupulously fair in presenting the arguments of the opposing camps. But the story never quite catches fire, and it ends with a transparently contrived death.

A weighty issue, but a wisp of a novel.

Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-375-42169-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SHAPE OF WONDER
by Alan Lightman & Martin Rees

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MIRACULOUS FROM THE MATERIAL
by Alan Lightman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE TRANSCENDENT BRAIN
by Alan Lightman

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.

The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.