What's startling about this first novel is that, while white heat radiates from between the lines, Lawton presents the American presence in Vietnam as a devious gentleman's war rather than as the obscene, all-thumbs conflict it's been at the hands of previous novelists. Giles Trent is so attached to the embattled Southeast Asian country that when he finishes a Navy stint, he returns as a civilian advisor in the pacification proceedings that get underway around 1970. Becoming Deputy Ambassador Stilton's ``fair-haired boy'' (a term he dislikes), Giles is neatly positioned to take the occasional jaunt under fire, as well as to observe the subtle chicaneries of the upper military echelons sitting in Saigon amidst ceramic elephants. Many of his activities are carried on with reporter/inamorata Emily Macdonnell by his side. Meanwhile, Giles's outstanding characteristic is his ability to avoid almost any genuinely perilous entanglement (though he'd like more of one with Emily). Instead, he goes about at a casual pace, not changing, as he accumulates cynical viewpoints from other, more engaged people- -disillusioned Americans, resigned Vietnamese. In a land where secrecy is so lax that ``fizzy drinks'' stands are set up along battlefields, Giles talks to the wily Vua Noi Lao, who takes no sides—or, depending how you look at it, all sides. He visits the common-law widow of Nathaniel Bummpo Jones to hear how she sizes up attitudes and prejudices as a native. He's also in on decision- making that affects the invasions of Cambodia and Laos—eventually taking his own chancy, atypical step. It's Giles to whom the Deputy Ambassador says of a meeting with Richard Nixon: ``His speech was all bathos and self-pity. It was coarse. It was full of racial and religious epithets. Damn it, a gentleman doesn't say certain things.'' Lawton, a former Marine who served in Vietnam and who was himself a civilian pacification officer, has an axe to grind, but, here, he does so with an exceedingly polished, different fineness.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-15-100171-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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
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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