The milieu is perfectly captured, but the storyline relies heavily on melodrama to propel the action forward. And the...
A rather plodding second effort from Schneider, founding editor of The Hungry Mind Review (now The Ruminator Review), returns to the themes and settings of his debut (Blue Bossa, 1998).
Set in 1964 in San Francisco, it chronicles the “secret love” between Jake Roseman, a middle-aged Jewish lawyer and civil-rights activist, and Nisa, a mulatto actress 20 years his junior. Two years before the action begins, Jake’s violinist wife, Inez, drove her car into a concrete embankment; Jake believes she committed suicide, though he allows his prepubescent children, Anna and Joey, now 15 and 9, to suppose her death an accident. The three Rosemans live with Jake’s father, Isaac, a cantankerous old violinist (Inez was his prize student) who harbors racist feelings and attempts to stymie Jake’s efforts on behalf of the shvartzehs by sending anonymous hate mail to his office. While Nisa and Jake cavort around the city—leading sit-ins, speaking at rallies, protesting outside the Republican convention—Peter, Nisa’s gay and Jewish best friend, embarks on a doomed relationship with Simon, the troubled son of Reverend Junius Sims, cologne-drenched leader of the city’s black community (and friend of Jake Roseman’s). After the first glow of their romance wears off, Nisa and Jake’s relationship becomes troubled: he refuses to introduce her to his family (fearing his father’s reaction), and she—as a result—finds herself disillusioned with a man who speaks publicly about equality, yet will not invite a dark-complexioned woman into his home. Jake’s problems with his father, and continued obsession with Inez (who appears to him as a ghost), contribute to their strife. As race relations in the city grow increasingly strained, the two sets of lovers struggle to work out their differences.
The milieu is perfectly captured, but the storyline relies heavily on melodrama to propel the action forward. And the often-stagey dialogue is no help. Disappointing, if often engaging.Pub Date: March 3, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89492-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
Certain to create interest, comment, and consideration.
The Book-of-the-Month Club dual selection, with John Gunther's Behind the Curtain (1949), for July, this projects life under perfected state controls.
It presages with no uncertainty the horrors and sterility, the policing of every thought, action and word, the extinction of truth and history, the condensation of speech and writing, the utter subjection of every member of the Party. The story concerns itself with Winston, a worker in the Records Department, who is tormented by tenuous memories, who is unable to identify himself wholly with Big Brother and The Party. It follows his love for Julia, who also outwardly conforms, inwardly rebels, his hopefulness in joining the Brotherhood, a secret organization reported to be sabotaging The Party, his faith in O'Brien, as a fellow disbeliever, his trust in the proles (the cockney element not under the organization) as the basis for an overall uprising. But The Party is omniscient, and it is O'Brien who puts him through the torture to cleanse him of all traitorous opinions, a terrible, terrifying torture whose climax, keyed to Winston's most secret nightmare, forces him to betray even Julia. He emerges, broken, beaten, a drivelling member of The Party. Composed, logically derived, this grim forecasting blueprints the means and methods of mass control, the techniques of maintaining power, the fundamentals of political duplicity, and offers as arousing a picture as the author's previous Animal Farm.
Certain to create interest, comment, and consideration.Pub Date: June 13, 1949
ISBN: 0452284236
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1949
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A thoroughly empathetic examination of the fragile human spirit, Backman’s latest will resonate a long time.
In Beartown, where the people are as "tough as the forest, as hard as the ice," the star player on the beloved hockey team is accused of rape, and the town turns upon itself.
Swedish novelist Backman’s (A Man Called Ove, 2014, etc.) story quickly becomes a rich exploration of the culture of hockey, a sport whose acolytes see it as a violent liturgy on ice. Beartown explodes after rape charges are brought against the talented Kevin, son of privilege and influence, who's nearly untouchable because of his transcendent talent. The victim is Maya, the teenage daughter of the hockey club’s much-admired general manager, Peter, another Beartown golden boy, a hockey star who made it to the NHL. Peter was lured home to bring winning hockey back to Beartown. Now, after years of despair, the local club is on the cusp of a championship, but not without Kevin. Backman is a masterful writer, his characters familiar yet distinct, flawed yet heroic. Despite his love for hockey, where fights are part of the game, Peter hates violence. Kira, his wife, is an attorney with an aggressive, take-no-prisoners demeanor. Minor characters include Sune, "the man who has been coach of Beartown's A-team since Peter was a boy," whom the sponsors now want fired. There are scenes that bring tears, scenes of gut-wrenching despair, and moments of sly humor: the club president’s table manners are so crude "you can’t help wondering if he’s actually misunderstood the whole concept of eating." Like Friday Night Lights, this is about more than youth sports; it's part coming-of-age novel, part study of moral failure, and finally a chronicle of groupthink in which an unlikely hero steps forward to save more than one person from self-destruction.
A thoroughly empathetic examination of the fragile human spirit, Backman’s latest will resonate a long time.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6076-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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