Not nothing, but it could have really been something.
In Anthony's debut, a high-living 1970s aircraft salesman tries to clear his mounting debts by piloting heroin into California from Mexico.
The oil embargo of 1973-74 is especially devastating for Martin Anderson, bon vivant. Emboldened by profits, he's moved his family into an expensive Bay Area suburb and acquired expensive hobbies and baubles: cabin cruiser, racehorse, cabin in Tahoe, big Cadillac. Now he's not only overstretched financially, but his family life is souring, too. His junior-high daughter has been experimenting with pot; his 9-year-old son is sending baffling, aggressive typed notes to classmates: "JESUS HATES YOU." Martin is mired in ever deeper debt, and when his horse trainer, Val, offers a chance to have $40,000 forgiven and earn $5,000 a trip by making night flights as an amateur smuggler, he jumps. As anyone who's ever seen a ’70s detective show or read the scores of similar novels knows, this is a Doomed Idea, drug-dealing thugs being what they are. Things quickly devolve. A narcotics detective starts snooping around, enlisting Martin's aid in a supposedly unrelated case; then Martin accidentally estranges himself from his wife, and she takes off with the kids (the half that's NOT an accident has less to do with Martin's needs than with the plot's; it won't do to have Martin's innocent family around when the mayhem begins). Soon thereafter, Val and his wife are brutally murdered, Martin finds himself with a big cache of drug money and we're set up for a bloody denouement. Where this book exceeds the expectations of its formula is in the finesse and wit with which Anthony handles both the setting and the swaggering, self-absorbed but often likable protagonist—he captures the ethos of the '70s and the soul of sad-sack Martin admirably, and the links to our own time are compelling. But the plot seems contrived and familiar.
Not nothing, but it could have really been something.Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-61620-022-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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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