A wildly funny sendup of the politically chaotic 1960s.
An undercover informant infiltrates an activist group that intends to nominate a pig for president at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 in this debut novel.
Corman Hodges served in Vietnam. As the result of some terrible misunderstanding never unambiguously described by the author, the veteran is compelled to work clandestinely for COINTELPRO, a “secret unit charged with snuffing the anti-war protests,” under the authority of the FBI. He insinuates himself into a band of Yippies—politically activist hippies—committed to nominating a pig for president during the tumultuous Democratic Convention in Chicago, a move the group believes will blanket the government in shame. The head of the Yippies is the infamous Abbie Hoffman, who puts the perennially agitated Sal in charge of the pig, dubbed “Pigasus” but frequently referred to as the president. Corman’s job is to play caretaker to the pig and to vigilantly watch Sal, of whom some in the group are suspicious. The feds are desperate to shut down Hoffman’s crew—they suspect that the Yippies plan to release LSD into Chicago’s water supply or maybe use the pig to hide an explosive device to perpetrate a terrorist attack, the possibilities described with delicious comic verve by Schneider. The feds command Corman to plant an envelope of heroin in the radicals’ headquarters, but he grows anxious that the bureau will eventually turn on him, too, and starts to plot his own escape. Everything goes awry, though, when the pig is captured by the cops and delivered to an animal-processing plant, from which Corman rescues him, a dangerous move. The author graphically reproduces the feral turbulence of the time and the shared cynicism of the two warring sides. Schneider displays a keen sensitivity to the politically surreal—Hoffman’s crowd really seems to believe its mischievous prank will topple the despotic powers that rule America. Further, Corman is the perfect middle ground between the two battling factions, a straight man to their humorous perversions and completely free of ideological baggage—he merely wants to extricate himself from the madness. The plot drags on at too great a length but remains a hilarious depiction of a strange time.
A wildly funny sendup of the politically chaotic 1960s.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Glimmerglass Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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