Too much for any but the most battle-hardened readers.
A salacious novel camouflaged as a historically accurate dramatization of the famous Vietnam War battle.
The cover’s sepia photograph and front pages filled with maps and charts of troop strength evoke something like a straightforward military history, but the fictional overlay seems contrived to advance a jingoistic, erotic interpretation of the war. Nuance rarely intrudes; superlatives abound; repetition distracts. Ehrlich (Isolde, 1991) creates caricatures, places them in unrealistic circumstances and has them say unbelievable things. At the center of the action is Col. Richard Vortex, a Rambo-like soldier—“93 kilograms of solid, rock hard and rippling, Communist pulverizing muscle.” He and others feast, fight and philander their way through the action without much discernible character development. Plot follows the real-life battle timeline, while historical details, often parlayed in pages of speechifying, paint an unsavory portrait of war. True to life, war is hell: Amid the profanity grisly combat scenes, wartime rapes only add to the misery. However, Ehrlich sometimes gratuitously commingles sex and violence. When Vortex and his South Vietnamese girlfriend (wearing an evening gown following dinner and dancing) interrogate a Viet Cong prisoner in an underground torture chamber, they combine copulation with dismemberment: “ ‘I shall tongue kiss this boy while you mutilate his toes,’ laughed Susie Ky.” Ehrlich extends depravity to nonfictional characters, too, besmirching such historical figures as Capt. Frank C. Willoughby, who helps his South Vietnamese girlfriend castrate her father, a Viet Cong collaborator. Messianic prayers after slaughters and characters lapsing into German to reminisce about Hitler’s Wehrmacht increase dissonance. Ehrlich has clearly studied the war extensively, but unfortunately, his fiction overwhelms any scholarship.
Too much for any but the most battle-hardened readers.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0646323022
Page Count: 804
Publisher: Levanter Publishing & Associates
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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