Flanagan, a senior vice president of VHI who has written extensively about the music industry, takes to fiction like an old...
Debut about the music industry by a writer who's in it and loves it, discords and all.
Thirty-year-old Jim Cantone has the ear and the feel, which is why he's been scoring so consistently as a rock ’n’ roll talent scout. Now multinational WorldWide Records, situated in the heart of Times Square, wants him to become head of its A&R (Artists & Repertoire) division. Wild Bill DeGaul, a seminal figure in the history of the industry, runs the company; J.B. Booth is his savvy second in command. Although Jim understands the downside of WorldWide—or at least he thinks he does—in terms of loss of independence, the money is hard to turn down. And, as the father of three-year-old twin sons, he does have a growing family to consider. So he signs on. At the beginning, the experience is nothing but positive. Marketing support from a company with deep pockets and an entrepreneurial spirit enables Jim to help develop deserving young performers in a way he never could have before. As for DeGaul and Booth, Jim comes to admire them both: DeGaul, the iconoclastic charmer, the music-industry visionary; Booth, the shrewd street fighter now turned man of business. Plus, he admires their friendship—so longstanding and seemingly impregnable. Except that suddenly it’s not. Ambition strikes Booth hard, and the Iago side of him, repressed though always present, breaks free. He wants power, maximum power, and all of it in his hands. As usual, he gets what he goes after. And also as usual, the price tag is higher than the one envisioned.
Flanagan, a senior vice president of VHI who has written extensively about the music industry, takes to fiction like an old hand. Fast-paced, funny, poignant, and, of course, sharply observed, this is first and foremost an entertainment. But Flanagan’s music industry is additionally a legitimate and unsettling metaphor for the way we live now.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50266-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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