Mystery veteran Gorman (Blood Moon, p. 666, etc.) sprays hot lead from the hip in this punchy historical thriller about a wild race to claim the secret recordings of the Blondest Hollywood Babylonian. It's the early 1960s, and ultra-paranoid FBI top cop J. Edgar Hoover wants to politically geld Jack and Bobby Kennedy. With the reluctant aid of his devoted Renfield, Clyde Tolson, Hoover schemes to obtain Marilyn Monroe's surreptitiously recorded tapes of her illicit unions with Bobby, the newly appointed attorney general; thus leveraged against Washington's best, brightest, and randiest, the waningly relevant Hoover intends to extort a few more years of political currency from JFK, who also trysted with the iconic yet desperately insecure starlet. By the time the plot gets underway, Monroe's ``suicide'' has been discovered, but the coveted tapes have disappeared into the safe of a piggishly dissolute Hollywood magazine publisher. Hoover dispatches psycho-lesbian West Coast operative Melanie Baines, a sadistic moll with an appetite for torturing her victims, to track down the big prize, but the Kennedy boys and their ``associates'' in the Mob also commission agents to join the chase. As if that weren't enough, Gorman wedges fossilized gossip columnist Louella Parsons into the story (the exclusive she'll write on the tapes will resuscitate her moribund career), along with a failed screenwriter scrambling to rescue her kidnapped daughter. A host of colorful minor characters, many of whom come to gruesome ends during the course of Baines's take-no-prisoners investigation, are the icing on this plentifully layered fictional cake. Throughout, while shifting between Washington and Tinseltown, Gorman interrupts the furious action with excerpts from Monroe's personal tapes, adding a melancholy sketch of a woman on the verge to his gleefully trashy narrative. If it weren't for the sputtery conclusion, this could be Madonna's first TV movie. Deliciously slick.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85646-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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