Haunting and rewarding as an intimate family chronicle and journalistic take on the entertainment industry, based, we’re...
The rise and near fall of a young Italian-Scottish singing sensation—a fictional composite of Shirley Temple, Liza Minelli, and Brittany Spears, among others.
Maria Tambini grows up on the isolated Scottish Island of Bute, raised by her unmarried mother. In 1979, Maria is a typical 12-year-old who loves candy and is devoted to her best friend Kalpana, daughter of the local Indian doctor. But Maria’s incredible singing voice sets her apart. After her uncle Alfredo arranges for a talent scout to hear her sing, Maria is off to London to live with her new manager and appear as an undefeatable contestant on Opportunity Knocks, hosted by an aging song-and-dance man who recognizes Maria’s talent and warns her about its power. It’s hard to decide just how much even Maria herself hungers for celebrity once her ambitious manager divides her from her family and sets up an exhausting appearance schedule. While Maria is the central subject, for much of the story she remains a mystery seen primarily through the eyes of the various people in her life. Many of these come more vibrantly to life than Maria herself, in particular her mother and grandmother, whose tortured histories and failures shadow Maria. Scottish journalist and novelist O’Hagan (Our Fathers, 1999, etc.) strongly suggests that celebrity robs the individual of personality—as he shows in the sad, dwindling correspondence between Maria and Kalpana as Kalpana grows into an educated, well-rounded young woman and Maria’s life narrows the more famous she becomes. She makes no friends but is always ready to please her elders and her public. Gradually, the desire to please turns Maria into an anorexic/bulimic who’s hospitalized periodically for exhaustion. Stalked by a fan who, a bit heavy-handedly, represents Maria’s public, she eventually finds happiness with a man who knew and cared for her as a boy on Bute before she was a star.
Haunting and rewarding as an intimate family chronicle and journalistic take on the entertainment industry, based, we’re told, “on the life story of a famous singer.”Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-15-101000-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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