A captivating examination of humanity’s fear of the unknown, with hints of sci-fi and fantasy.
Donovan (Conspiracy Films, 2011, etc.) ventures into fiction with this story of baffling stone globes suddenly appearing around the world and the ways in which the populace responds.
Ex-cop Rick Ballantine may have stumbled on a topic for the reality TV show pilot he’s shooting, Confirmation: Investigations of the Unexplained. More specifically, he crashes into it: a 15-foot-wide stone globe sitting on a gravelly California road. It’s the type of unexplained event the Confirmation crew fancies, especially as there’s no indication of anyone transporting the globe to that spot. Skeptics, like the local authorities, are sure there’s a reasonable explanation, even when an identical sphere appears in New Jersey. But when multiple globes crop up worldwide, civilians and conspiracy theorists flock to the sites. Rick and his colleagues—including journalist Cornelia Oxenburg and the show’s academic, Dan Knight— become the center of the media’s attention for their initial discovery. Debates on the nature of the globes are incessant, with assorted reactions: Some believe they’re a sign of aliens while others see them as a government subterfuge. But soon come the “hum-experiencers,” people who say they can hear a buzzing sound emitting from the globes. Is it a message or simply a series of unfounded claims? Despite the possibly supernatural globes, Donovan’s leisurely paced novel concentrates on the human element. Citizens in different countries, for example, presuming governments are hiding the truth of extraterrestrials, stage sometimes-violent protests. There’s likewise an exhaustive backstory; the Chinese triads’ involvement in a globe-related explosion precipitates the discussion of a 1970s Bruce Lee–imitating film star that’s entertaining but digressive. Nevertheless, the tale is at its best when presenting diverse forms of media; most chapters conclude with a newspaper article, while characters relay information via blogs, podcasts, and social media. These are sometimes-comical: DJs on a vapid radio show seem irritated that some of the globes appear outside the U.S. The ending provides a few clarifications and lingering questions for readers to ponder.
A captivating examination of humanity’s fear of the unknown, with hints of sci-fi and fantasy.Pub Date: July 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62989-950-3
Page Count: 326
Publisher: World Castle Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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