Butterflies are pretty, light, and charming; this book, not so much.
Harrison mixes vignettes of the sex lives of rich people, mainly young and Eurasian, with journalistic pieces on economics, physics, and politics.
In the fictional portions of this book, members of a Shanghai sorority—an exclusive club for rich, politically well-connected young women—jockey for position as they enjoy luxurious lifestyles and explore their sexuality. Meanwhile, the young men in their circle work business deals, take drugs, pursue status, and chase women. In other chapters, a Creator called Taupin, living on a planet with three suns, tries to make sense of the Logos Simulation. There are also ghosts. In the nonfiction sections, journalist/entrepreneur Harrison, writing his debut work, sets forth his research and theories on such topics as hyperdimensionality, consciousness, authenticity, socioeconomics, bitcoin, and democracy. The author recommends his peripatetic, flitting style—or butterfly approach—to the reader as the best method for understanding coming change. Harrison draws some interesting connections, as when he compares the 1989 Tiananmen Square protestors to American hip-hop artists. He can be opaque (readers with “no inclination for a massively technical discussion” are invited to skip Chapter 3), but he explains the intricacies of, for example, digital-payment systems well: “Because bitcoin is all part of one great code, it is impossible for a single bitcoin to be counterfeit.” Alongside so much lesbian teenage sex, this could be a heady mix. But often, the book resembles nothing so much as dull 18th-century pornography in which sordid sex scenes alternate with treatises on political liberty: “ ‘Now personally,’ surmised Gina, waving her left finger, still wet with my white cum smear, ‘I don’t think that God is light or dark or maybe even anything.’ ” Also, while the work is breathlessly excited by all things cutting edge, its presentation of female sexuality is not well-informed fiction: “I came on my clit,” says a confused young lady.
Butterflies are pretty, light, and charming; this book, not so much.Pub Date: May 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1512128680
Page Count: 382
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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