by Chip Kidd ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 16, 2001
. . . suck brains with a genius who really is a genius: that is, when you Read This Book.
Sheer charm most of the way in debut fiction by acclaimed book-cover artist Kidd, associate director of jackets at Knopf.
So, what are cheese monkeys? Back in 1957, Nameless the Narrator has little idea what college means and so chooses an art major as the path of least hardship. When State U beds him down three-to-a-room, he takes up sleeping on a mattress in the art room, where plump Dottie Spang teaches Introduction to Drawing. He soon falls for talented, outspoken, Salingeresque cutie-pie Himillsy H. Dodd, a whisky drinker who drops him with such exotica as “McGreet” and the “loove” and tells him Dottie Spang “couldn’t teach a piece of shit how to stink.” The Venus de Milo? “She’s a woman as men want her: a nice set of knockers and no fists or fingernails to defend them. You’re all pigs.” What does she think of the Dixie chick Maybelle Lee in their art class? “She’s a birthday cake with legs.” This trio’s intellectual explosion comes with Introduction to Commercial Art, which their teacher, Winter Sorbeck, instantly tells them is a misnomer: the class is Introduction to Graphic Design. “Commercial Art tries to make you buy things. Graphic Design gives you ideas.” Sorbeck blazes with staggeringly intense ideas—GOOD IS DEAD—that joyously burn up the page. He is worth any reader’s time, his sadism too wonderful to mangle here. How best can you thumb a ride with only a sheet of paper and a marker? Try: I AM NOT ARMED. That’s an idea Himmilsy comes up with when Sorbeck takes the whole class out and makes them put ideas into action on a stingingly cold winter day, the students one by one stopping cars with a graphic design held aloft. Some later scenes remain problematic. But, winterized, the students soon see everything everywhere in Graphic Design, as will you when you . . . .
. . . suck brains with a genius who really is a genius: that is, when you Read This Book.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1492-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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