Imagine E.L. Doctorow (who makes an appearance in these pages) on psychedelic mushrooms.
Deconstructing the legacy of muckraker Upton Sinclair, this kaleidoscopic novel gives the Old Left a postmodern spin, with results that are frequently funny and occasionally exasperating.
Except for perhaps a musical comedy based on these pages, it’s hard to imagine a less likely cultural artifact than this madcap romp through the lives of Upton Sinclair, best remembered for The Jungle, yet sometimes confused in these pages with Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt). Upton Sinclair died in 1968—just months after his 90th birthday, in a year that saw the class struggles to which he’d devoted his life and art take a New Left plunge into counter-culture chaos. Within the vivid imagination of Bachelder (Bear v. Shark, 2001), Sinclair never really dies—at least not for long. Instead, like the “Joe Hill” of the famous union anthem, he lives on within the movement whose ideals he had embodied. Yet Sinclair’s brand of socialist Utopianism has become as anachronistic as his finger-pointing, exclamation-pointed fiction, once highly celebrated, now consigned to oblivion (he in fact won the Pulitzer Prize for 1942’s long-forgotten Dragon’s Teeth). Slapstick farce combines with social satire as the impossibly prolific novelist, well past 100 and showing his age, continues to proselytize to diminishing effect. He keeps writing (A Moveable Jungle!, in response to outsourcing) and keeps dying, killed by assassins who become folk heroes for defending the American way of life. Amid the vast indifference of the public at large, he and his adversaries form a symbiotic relationship, each needing the other. Though the novel’s depiction of an impotent, intellectually bankrupt leftist movement in America might anger liberal sympathizers, Bachelder ultimately proves an equal-opportunity offender, capable of enraging those on both sides of the cultural divide. Ultimately, his comic vision sparks a comparatively serious inquiry into the nature, power and possibilities of art, in these times, in this country.
Imagine E.L. Doctorow (who makes an appearance in these pages) on psychedelic mushrooms.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2006
ISBN: 1-58234-636-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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