Comic coming-of-ager pits a pair of Boston computer geeks against an aging mafioso and the insular neighborhood he controls. Jewelry-encrusted, cannelloni-chomping crime lord Davio Giaccalone, a denizen of the linked stories in Lyons’s nicely turned collection, The Last Good Man (1993), now symbolizes all that’s bad, violent, old, and stupid for Reilly and Evan, a pair of workaholic, arrested-adolescent programmers who share a not-so-cheap apartment in Boston’s rapidly gentrifying working-class Italian North End neighborhood. Reilly, the Irish- nebbish narrator, is especially sensitive to the abusive taunts he receives from Giaccalone’s weight-lifting, hood-in-training nephew Tony. The latter can’t understand what Maria Bava, the neighborhood’s prized sexpot, sees in Reilly, and he uses a dispute over a bill in his uncle’s cappuccino joint to beat up Reilly and vandalize his car. Reilly, however, likes Maria only as a friend, having fallen for, and then been jilted by, the be-freckled Jeanie. He’s also having problems on the job, where a bug-filled Internet application he’s developing with Evan for a Microsoft competitor may never function properly. Lyons creates several hilarious scenes showing how craven, nasty, and hypocritical the software business can get, and then he has Reilly, feeling a need to patch up his pride, kidnap Coco, Giaccalone’s racing greyhound, for ransom that he doesn’t really need. Reilly soon discovers, though, that he’s no match for old world menace and ends up escaping to Florida with the dog, Evan, and Maria, whose relatives are higher up the criminal ladder than Giaccalone and are eager to enforce a truce after she announces that Reilly is her fiancÇ. Alas, Reilly gets cold feet about committing to Maria—but after she goes to Russia with the Peace Corps, he lights out after her. Lyons’s antihero whines and pines a bit overmuch, but his debut novel charms with its dead-on satires of fey software drones and snide Gen-Xers who—ve swapped slacker ennui for angst-filled ambition.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84000-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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