A skillfully crafted and entertaining cautionary tale.
Three young New York gossip columnists face tough personal and professional choices while chronicling the decadent misadventures of the rich and famous.
Holding tight to idealistic dreams of becoming an investigative journalist, 22-year-old Kate Simon has mixed feelings when she takes an entry-level job reporting on parties for the New York Examiner. These early reservations take a back seat, however, as the ingénue finds herself seduced by instant access to the kind of events her peers could only dream of. She discovers unlikely allies in rival columnists Tim and Blake, who take her under their boozy wings and initiate her into their dizzying underworld of sex and drugs, where “items” are scribbled on cocktail napkins, and juicy info is traded, or held, for favors. Tabloid nightlife fixture Tim is a sexy, cynical bad boy who occupies himself with an endless stream of model/actresses, also known as “mattresses” until he meets Kate’s stunning friend Zoe, a rich girl who shares his hard-partying ways. Their romance appears doomed, though, when one of Tim’s former conquests comes forward claiming to be pregnant with his baby, fueling his self-destructive tendencies. Unlike habitually broke Tim, trust-fund preppy Blake chooses to work, earning the thinly veiled contempt of his media-hating banker dad, who thinks his son should write features. But when his father is investigated for financial improprieties involving expensive paintings, Blake finally sees an opportunity to be useful to his family, if his friends don’t scoop the story first. Meanwhile, Kate falls for talented and media-savvy chef Marco Mancini, but finds herself wondering if the restaurateur genuinely cares for her, or is using her connection to keep his own past secret. Soon enough, Kate comes to see the vacuous world she covers as a dead end dressed up in gift bags and free meals. Sharply written and peppered with authentic detail and boldface names, this witty debut from journalist Schoeneman sags only slightly with a too-obvious message on the ultimate emptiness of the pursuit of fame.
A skillfully crafted and entertaining cautionary tale.Pub Date: May 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-23746-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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