Sweetly silly and very wise. This is what we want to put back in place when the city pulls out of the nightmare.
A fond fable from what one hopes is not a vanished New York.
So deft and so deeply kind is Trillin (Family Man, 1998, etc.) that this send-up of Mayor Giuliani, written before the September disaster, instead of collapsing like a dead soufflé, survives high and light. Courteous, friendly, family man Murray Tepper has become a burr under Mayor Ducavelli’s saddle. His crime? Parking. Mr. Tepper, a modest Manhattan businessman, who became expert in the arcane specialty of street-parking regulations in the ’70s and ’80s, now, at his wife’s request, rents space in a garage convenient to his home. But, at the turn of the millennium, though he could safely stow the car in its slot and forget it, he has taken to exercising his street parking savvy and rights in the evening and on weekends. It’s not a big deal. He just likes to drive to one of those a nice parking spots he knows as well as anyone alive, pay the meter if necessary, take out the paper, and enjoy a nice read. The parking is always scrupulously legal (he wouldn’t dream of refilling a meter.), but Tepper’s making trouble. Other parkers, taking his presence in the car to indicate imminent departure, become routinely incensed when he politely waves them on. His wife, friends, and business associates have begun to worry. Why would anybody spend time parking on the streets when there’s this perfectly good and paid-for spot in the garage? Tepper, though always polite, provides no explanation, pointing out only that he is parking legally. But not, apparently, morally. Fussbudget Mayor Ducavelli (“Il Duce” in the tabs), reading a city column about Tepper’s odd abuse of parking rights, takes Tepper for a saboteur of civil order and sics the police on him. The mayoral harassment becomes quickly public, and Tepper, despite his innate modesty, becomes something of a city hero for standing up to the bully.
Sweetly silly and very wise. This is what we want to put back in place when the city pulls out of the nightmare.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50676-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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