A powerful, affecting second effort.
Cruz (Soledad, 2001), chronicler of New York Dominican life, traces a family’s embittering struggle to establish itself between a revolutionary Dominican Republic (circa 1965) and early 1990s Bronx.
Don Chan of Los Llanos, D.R., is the patriarch and anchor of this somber tale. A Chinese who somehow washed up on the beach when he was a child, he ended up marrying the same woman, Caridad, who discovered and took care of him 70 years before, and with whom he tended a farm he acquired during the revolutionary days of the mid-60s. But Caridad has died, and Don Chan leaves his country for the first time in 1991 to live with his son and family in New York City, where Santo and Esperanza fled ten years prior to work as a cab driver and nurse’s aide, respectively, while trying to raise two children in a better life. To Don Chan, however, they live like rats, in a tiny, noisy apartment with much crime, fear and no trees; he fires Santo up remembering the good old days when the peasants, led by Don Chan and the prophetic teenager Miraluz, organized themselves and tried to resist the rich dictator Trujillo, even briefly voting in their own president, Juan Bosch. Yearning for home proves too much for Santo, who becomes the tragic casualty of a cab holdup, while Esperanza, educated on Dallas reruns, rejects her past as a defeat and disastrously embraces the acquisitiveness of America. Their children, most unfortunately, are caught up in this generational mayhem, and Don Chan, resistant to the changes of the present, adrift in Nueva York, gradually loses hold of his sanity. Cruz handles this sad tale with dignity devoid of melodrama. She demonstrates enormous affection for her characters without sentimentalizing their naivete or ignorance. Her Esperanza, for example, is a silly, greedy creature, willfully self-disillusioned yet also tremendously adaptable and devoted to her family.
A powerful, affecting second effort.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1203-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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