An alternative to the Banana Republic gift certificate for that difficult nephew with a birthday.
Fiction and nonfiction pulled from the main- and side-stream by McSweeney’s editor Eggers, founder of a San Francisco writing lab for city youth, is the latest in Houghton Mifflin’s Great American Series.
Even with forewords from inaugural guest editor Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 2000) and series editor Michael Cart, a well-known YA author, the new category “nonrequired” is less than clear. Even so, there are pieces from old standbys Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, and, yes, the New Yorker, cheek by jowl with bits from the Onion, Optic Nerve, Spin, and ZYZZYVA. Though aimed at younger-than-boomer readers, the pieces are not necessarily by or about the less-than-middle-aged. Eric Schlosser’s “Why McDonald’s French Fries Taste So Good” is a fascinating but almost geekily well-researched piece about the flavor enhancement biz; it educates even though it was probably chosen to appeal to vegan terrorists and their supporters. Adrian Tomine’s “Bomb Scare,” from Optic Nerve, is a gloomy and graphic high-school-life-sucks-so-bad piece that goes on nearly as long as high school. Karl Taro Greenfield’s “Speed Demons,” from Time, clearly explains the appeal of meth and other uppers. While a number of pieces have been included as comic relief, only David Sedaris (unsurprisingly) and the Onion bits (“Local Hipster Overexplaining Why He Was At The Mall” and “Marilyn Manson Now Going Door To Door Trying To Shock People”) are likely to crack anybody up. Perhaps the truly cool don’t want to be caught guffawing. Rodney Rothman’s almost-nonfiction “My Fake Job,” disowned by the New Yorker, is amusing but so dryly that there’s no danger of snorting or snot flying. The sentimental favorite is a long, wonderful piece from Sports Illustrated, of all places, by Gary Smith, about a black coach who brings magic to an Amish community in Ohio. Readers who aren’t reduced to blubbering should seek medical attention.
An alternative to the Banana Republic gift certificate for that difficult nephew with a birthday.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-24693-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
A somewhat puzzling book, but — all in all — it is good Hemingway, and a sure sale. Key West and Cuba form the settings for a tough story of men at the end of their tether, grasping at any straw, regardless of risk, to turn a few dollars. Rum-running, smuggling aliens, carrying revolutionary arms. Gangsters, rich sportsmen, sated with routine, dissipated women and men — they are not an incentive to belief in the existence of decent people. But in spite of the hard-boiled, bitter and cruel streak, there is a touch of tenderness, sympathy, humanity. Adventure — somewhat disjointed. The first section seems simply to set the stage — the story starting after the prelude is over. The balance forms a unit, working up to a tragic climax and finale. There is something of The Sun Also Rises,and a Faulkner quality, Faulkner at his best. A book for men — and not for the squeamish. You know your Hemingway market. His first novel in 8 years.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1937
ISBN: 0684859238
Page Count: 177
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1937
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Edgar’s own story in the present is more compelling than the revelations of the key’s past, and the novel might have been...
The prolific master of psycho-horror returns to the mysteries of the creative process, a subject that has inspired some of his most haunting work.
This could be considered a companion piece to The Shining, offering plenty of reversals on that plot. In both cases, isolation has severe effects on the psyche of an artist, yet where the former novel found its protagonist in a lethal state of writer’s block, the latter sees a one-time building magnate transformed into an impossibly prolific and powerful painter, due to circumstances beyond his control. And where the isolation in the former had a family cut off from society by a frigid northern winter, the setting of the latter is a mysterious Florida key, lush and tropical in its overgrowth, somehow immune to commercial development. A self-made millionaire, Edgar Freemantle narrates the novel in a conversational, matter-of-fact tone. He explains how a job-site accident cost him his arm, his sanity (during the early part of an extended recuperation) and his wife (whom he had physically threatened after the accident transformed him into something other than himself). What he gained was a seemingly inexplicable command as a visual artist, particularly after his recuperation (from both his accident and his marriage) takes him to the isolated Duma Key, where the only other inhabitants are an elderly, wealthy woman and her caretaker. It seems that all three have suffered severe traumas that bond them and that perhaps have even drawn them together. Soon Edgar discovers that his art has given him the power not only to predict the future, but to transform it. He ultimately pays a steep price for his artistic gifts, particularly as his investigation of the mysteries of Duma Key lead him to discover the tragic origins of his artistic vision.
Edgar’s own story in the present is more compelling than the revelations of the key’s past, and the novel might have been twice as powerful if it had been cut by a third, but King fans will find it engrossing.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5251-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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