Much is bitten off and most is chewed, but things end rather hastily in a Bondish way that betrays the wonderfully somber...
An American geologist, licking his wounds in Mali, is pressed into service by an angel of mercy and an evil agent of Big Business. Or Government. Whatever.
The desert and the piteous, stoic refugees of Saharan Africa distinguish this first novel that takes on ethnic warlords, cynical international businesses, UN bureaucrats, the intelligence community, and sundry opportunists hoping to get rich off the disposal of nuclear waste. Ty Campbell is the morose scientist living in a box in the Malian wasteland, monitoring the groundwater and mourning the murder of his wife by sub-Saharan marauders. His weird and solitary world is disrupted by the establishment of a nearby camp for refugees fleeing the bloodthirsty madness of a stalemated civil war. The refugees have lost all links to the world’s rescue machinery save for the labors of Lila, a scrappy young woman who will not give up, even though she has nothing to give but her wits and her formidable will. Lila draws Ty into the Africans’ seemingly hopeless dilemma by her example and then presses him to cooperate with Timbuktu Earthwealth, newcomers digging into the desert bedrock under the direction of Bud Van Sickle, an American with ties to the intelligence community. Van Sickle can do much for the Malians if Ty will agree to pose as a disinterested expert and take a place on the international panel with the power to decide on a dumping site for all the world’s radioactive waste. And, for the sake of the refugees, he does. As aid flows into the camp, Ty flies back to the first world and, after training in a semiofficial boot camp for spooks, learns how to pass for a technocrat and proceeds to deliberative sessions in Switzerland. There are field trips to the three possible dumping sites, all complicated by protests under the direction of a supermodel turned supergreen. Everything comes to a boil back in Mali, where the warlords have resumed their battle.
Much is bitten off and most is chewed, but things end rather hastily in a Bondish way that betrays the wonderfully somber beginnings.Pub Date: April 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-6723-X
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2002
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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