Bizarre and inconsistent.
From Landsman (The Devil’s Chimney, 1997), the story of a woman who channels her dying father’s memories of his youth in South Africa.
It is the last chapter in Dr. Harold Klein’s storied life, and as he lies unconscious in an Intensive Care Unit, his family gathers around him, including his wife, son Simon and, most significantly, his pregnant daughter Betsy, who has come all the way from New York to say goodbye. In some of the more coherent chapters, Betsy remembers her own interactions with her father, recalling his dismay at her cabinet full of homeopathic remedies on a tense visit to New York, or his tenuous relationship with her partner, William. But, for the most part, Betsy narrates not her own life but her father’s, speaking in the second person and inhabiting his emotional memory so deeply that it is impossible to trust her role as the narrator. She begins with a moment from his teenage years in small-town George, South Africa, when Harry, the painfully skinny son of the town’s beloved Russian Jewish shopkeeper, explores a cut on the thigh of a local girl and simultaneously discovers the worlds of medicine and of women. Betsy follows Harry’s adolescence, as well as his sassy sister Maisie and spoiled younger brother Bertie, through his departure to medical school in Cape Town at the dawning of World War II. Sharing a room in the big city with other small-town boys, Harry debates enlisting in the army, studies anatomy, pines after his classmate Dorothy and woos a freckled girl named Stella. Some of the details are captivating, particularly those relating to religion, race and politics. Harry’s father’s burial in the first grave in the first Jewish cemetery in the African countryside, for example, is particularly redolent. But many of the memories concern Harry’s sexual awakening. Awkwardly presented from Betsy’s perspective, these sections are not nearly as engaging as they could be.
Bizarre and inconsistent.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-56947-469-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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