Raucous, imaginative entertainment.
A robot doctor makes the rounds in this wacky medical fantasia.
Mount Sinai Hospital’s newest intern, Dr. Alan Rossum, is too good to be true–or at least human. He’s “fireproof, germ-retardant, buoyant, unstainable, extremely flexible and even shrink-resistant,” can diagnose most patients just by looking at them, and is already an expert in every specialty. His preternatural good looks and comforting bedside manner provoke all women to throw themselves at him, though his heart belongs to the elevator computer with the lilting loudspeaker. Best of all, in the eyes of the cost-conscious hospital management that bought him, he’s cheap, doesn’t mind odd hours and never goes on strike. But even when his leg is blown off and he must go hopping across the grounds to retrieve it, no one, aside from a ten-year-old boy in the psych ward, particularly notices that Rossum is an android. He hardly stands out at a place where the top surgeon is blind and dismembered corpses are spliced back together and reanimated. His presence does, however, arouse the wrath of the mysterious M.A.F.–either the Medical Anti-Defamation Foundation or the Mobsters Against Fysicians, according to a high-priced abbreviations consultant–a terrorist group that launches high-concept attacks on the hospital’s board. One director is permanently magnetized by an MRI machine while another is pushed into a giant photocopier and emerges with a compulsive urge to mimic everyone he encounters. Simmons, an internist and author of The Z-Papers (1976, etc.), orchestrates the hijinks with a healthy disregard for rhyme and reason. His surreal gags puts one in mind of Douglas Adams, had he written A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Medical Center. (A stint in Mount Sinai’s extraterrestrial’s ward makes for one of Dr. Rossum’s most hilarious adventures.) The result is a pixilated comedy that’s as light as a balloon filled with laughing-gas.
Raucous, imaginative entertainment.Pub Date: March 18, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-3053-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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