The author of Redcoat and the popular Sharpe series of historical military adventures drops into the 20th century for a yachting thriller about an unwilling earl and a missing van Gogh. The Earl of Stowey has decided that there's not much point in using one's hereditary title if one hasn't been left enough money to dress for the job. So he's just John Rossendale to his yachting bum cronies. Sailing the world on Sunflower, the sailboat he was able to buy with the little he was left, Rossendale has spent four years away from home and away from his odious mother and spiteful twin sister. But the bankers have called. Mum is on her deathbed and would he please have the decency to sail home and say good-bye? Nobleman that he is, Rossendale returns only to receive his mother's dying curse. The problem is that everybody seems to think John stole the family van Gogh, their last remaining art treasure, the sale of which would have kept the manor in the family. Worse yet, everybody thinks he still has the painting, and they're trying to get it back. A pair of goons sent by persons unknown are ready to demolish his yacht in the search for van Gogh's sunflowers. And the ravishing Jennifer Pallavicini, stepdaughter to England's nouveau richest collector, is ready to offer 20 million pounds on behalf of dad. But John hasn't the faintest idea where the painting is. He'd run away from the lot of them, but his evil twin is threatening to wrench their idiot sister away from her asylum in order to get control of her trust fund. And this Miss Pallavicini is awfully pretty. . . Competent but unexceptional sails-and-slaughter adventure. Mildly violent.
Pub Date: Aug. 14, 1989
ISBN: 0061000469
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1989
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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