An urbane think-piece of a novel on alleged moon-landing—and baseball and business and marriage—lies, not to be mistaken for...
Hallberg plants seeds of doubt about the Apollo moon landings in this social satire about a fallen adman’s learning an astronaut hero, his deceased baseball teammate from high school, might have held a history-changing secret.
Hallberg’s hefty narrative covers four minutely detailed days in the life of Tom “Trif” Hammock, a down-on-his-luck New Yorker now in a disintegrating marriage to abrasive TV journalist Kate Miller. Hammock is flailing in his new career in cutthroat Manhattan real estate. His crucial assignment: Broker a hot property, the apartment of Lt. Col. Elijah “Boon” Juster, a recently deceased athlete and hedge fund spokesman—and also one of the last Apollo astronauts, famed for hitting a baseball on the lunar surface. Juster attended school with Hammock and played alongside him in a legendary 1971 student baseball game, described in lengthy flashbacks, with participants who, 40 years later, recur in the present-day narrative. As Tom prepares Boon’s puzzling estate, he finds a secret stash of conspiracy material. Tom’s flirtatious co-worker Cerise keeps insinuating that the NASA moon landings were, in fact, staged hoaxes, and Boon was apparently about to reveal this before his fatal heart attack. Meanwhile, Kate won’t let up on Tom—not so much to give him hope about their relationship but more so to enhance her scandalous news report on Boon, who she suspects was party to high-level Wall Street chicanery. A typical genre novelist might be tempted to turn the search for Boon’s missing hard drive into Dan Brown–esque chases and gunfights. But not Hallberg, who pitches a comedy of manners, with a small cast of schemers in just a few locations—readers might imagine this as a stage play or a modest indie film—ruminating on love, loss, prestige, greed, baseball (including the game’s secret origins) and the struck-out American dream. Floating in a low-gravity, mildly tragicomic narrative of abandoned childhood innocence and nostalgia, the message is that in a Great Recession USA of middle-class downsizings, lapsed idols, lying presidents and cheating banks, the moon landing remains one thing Americans can point to with pride—so why not suspect it of being just another instance of government-military–corporate-media fakery? Though the plot includes scattered citations and websites for moon-landing skeptics, conspiracy obsessives looking for a direct j’accuse may be frustrated by the book’s mordant, Stendahl-like literary approach.
An urbane think-piece of a novel on alleged moon-landing—and baseball and business and marriage—lies, not to be mistaken for a sci-fi thriller.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9913770-3-9
Page Count: 488
Publisher: TRFE, LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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