A savvy novel that deals with Hollywood from a cultural rather than a tabloid perspective.
In this fiction debut, journalist Burr (The Perfect Scent, 2008, etc.) offers the tale of a movie executive’s wife leading a book-discussion group.
Anne Hammersmith met Howard Rosenbaum at Columbia University, where they both received their doctorates in English literature. Soon after graduation he got an opportunity to produce movies in Hollywood, and after negotiating some difficult fertility issues, they had a son, Sam. Eventually Anne is able to indulge her love for literature in an unusual way, by starting a book club for people in the movie industry. This would seem to be an uphill battle, for even though the air is full of talk about scripts, as one of Howard’s acquaintances informs Anne, “Nobody reads in Hollywood.” Anne is one of those people able to discern literature’s connections to her own life, so the books she chooses for the discussion group serve as a commentary on her family relationships and social position. Tolstoy on dinner parties (in Anna Karenina), Auden on “namelessness” and identity in the modern age, George Eliot on anti-Semitism and what to do with one’s life (in Romola) all elucidate Anne’s increasingly frayed social and domestic bonds. Sam, a preternaturally precocious boy who grew up doting on the clever wordplay and allusions of his literary parents, as a teenager reveals that he’s gay, but also becomes increasingly interested in the religious heritage of his father. Howard, previously a thoroughly secular Jew, begins to move toward orthodoxy, which both hurts and frustrates Anne. The religious divisions Howard erects are barriers to their marriage, she contends: “If you are now a Jew and I am now a Gentile, you have now placed me in a fundamentally different category of human beings from yours. We are divided.”
A savvy novel that deals with Hollywood from a cultural rather than a tabloid perspective.Pub Date: June 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-171565-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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