A Doris Lessing-like chronicle—1970's-set, dense with detail- -about an upstate New York family with wounds too deep to heal without a tragedy. Lehman's second (Waterboys, 1989) captures the intransigence and generational confusion endemic to the 70's. Walter Gajewski—father of three (Carl, Cee, and Jason) and a ``lumbering self-satisfied hulk of a man''—doesn't live out the story here, but his children will manage to cause him and each other a good deal of grief in working out their destinies. The book, often enough literary in its encyclopedic presentation of its milieu, is also a high-toned soap opera. Carl squats with his wife and sick child Melissa, but Walter is hired to help evict him so that developers can build a resort at Quaspeck Lake. Meanwhile, sister Cee, a reader but also a dropout after a ``botched suicide,'' isn't sure at first about her sexual orientation (``There it was again, sex—the subject was never far from the surface''), but she discovers it soon enough with a vengeance: she's straight, and men are a drug. Jason, the third child, also has sexual-identity problems before going into hiding in the New York gay underground. All of this is worked out against a backdrop of Richard Nixon and Vietnam on the tube. Walter is voted Father- of-the-Year—an award that hardly reflects the true family situation—then gets knocked out at a lake demonstration, an event followed by a big finale replete with folksingers and cops. Eventually, the old man dies of pneumonia, while Cee is left to summarize what's left of the family. If this all sounds a bit hurried and cluttered, it is—but, even so, Lehman's confident orchestration of characters and incident finally makes for a literate page-turner that uses family melodrama to good effect.
Pub Date: Aug. 3, 1993
ISBN: 1-56279-036-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
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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