A career-making book that bears interesting comparison with both Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist (1998) and Michael...
McCracken just may strike it rich with this enchantingly detailed and immensely appealing follow-up to the NBA-nominated The Giant’s House (1996).
Mose Sharp, half of the celebrated comedy team Carter and Sharp, tells their story 30 years after his estrangement from his partner Rocky Carter. McCracken has researched widely and well, and the story offers a delicious panorama of the American entertainment industry throughout the 20th century, as Mose, “a nice Jewish boy from Iowa who stumbled from one act to another,” relates his experiences first as a nondescript vaudevillian and then as straight man to the ebullient Rocky. Visions of Abbott and Costello and/or Laurel and Hardy dance through the reader’s head as the novel moves both backward and forward. We learn the roots of Mose’s motivation in his relationship with his older sister (and mentor) Hattie, their five other sisters, and their stoical widowed father; we follow the team’s upward mobility through the Midwest’s vaudeville circuit, on radio (Rudy Vallee’s show, then their own), in Hollywood, and eventually on television. Rocky goes through four wives, while Mose marries beautiful dance instructor Jessica Howard, fathers four children (three of whom survive), and ends the partnership when a justifiably aggrieved Rocky makes a damaging threat. The elegiac final 50 pages chronicle Rocky’s inexplicable disappearance, Mose’s continuing career as a movie character actor, and a wonderfully written halfhearted reconciliation attempt that takes place in, of all places, Reno, Nevada. The show-biz atmosphere is re-created with great skill. The comic routines McCracken devises for her protagonists (one of which provides her superb title) are suitably dated and groan-worthy, and the juxtapositions of Rocky’s and Mose’s gaudy public images with the scruffy realities of their private lives are charted with masterly precision and empathy. And what a movie this will make (there’s a killer part for Nathan Lane).
A career-making book that bears interesting comparison with both Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist (1998) and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000). This one is going places.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-31837-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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