by Garth Hallberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 24, 2014
An urbane think-piece of a novel on alleged moon-landing—and baseball and business and marriage—lies, not to be mistaken for...
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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
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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