Ornate, Shakespeare-esque diction often subverts clarity. But such meticulously researched throat-clearing may lure readers...
Antiquarian-books dealer Minkoff chronicles the founding of the Virginia colony, sometimes too exhaustively, in this first volume of the planned In the Land of Whispers trilogy.
Here we meet the major players, including Captain John Smith, Native American emperor Powhatan and his favorite daughter, Pocahontas. Casting his formidable shadow over the privately financed establishment of Jamestown in 1607 is Sir Francis Drake, whose late-16th-century exploits are related as extended campfire yarns by an ancient mariner, Drake’s erstwhile shipmate, Jonas Profit. Captain John Smith (his rank was earned while fighting the Turks for Zsigmond, King of Transylvania) is rankled by his fellow Englishmen’s sloth and preening sense of privilege. Gentlemen among the would-be colonists shun work, so constructing fortifications and shelter, cultivating crops and dealing with the vassal tribes of duplicitous Chief Powhatan are largely left to Smith and his embattled supporters. Although appointed by investors as one of a seven-member colonial council, he’s under accusation of mutiny for volunteering advice during the crossing to America. Ratcliffe, gentleman avatar of rapacious, exploitative colonialism, challenges Smith for control of the settlement. Drake, a humanitarian revered by Smith and Profit, manages to steal Spanish gold and grow fabulously rich while also acting as an avenging angel for the Spaniard-oppressed African slaves and indigenous peoples of Panama. When Drake is aided by the Cimarrones, a band of escaped slaves, he gives them the future site of the Roanoke colony as refuge. No trace of Roanoke remains other than rumors among Chesapeake tribes of the so-called Ocanahonan. Smith yearns chastely for Pocahontas (not really jailbait, he assures us), becomes a sub-chief, or werowance, and decamps on explorations even though he knows Jamestown will starve without his practical know-how. At the end, he’s resisting (though not very strenuously) deification by a new tribe.
Ornate, Shakespeare-esque diction often subverts clarity. But such meticulously researched throat-clearing may lure readers to the future installments, in which the straggly threads of narrative introduced here will, one hopes, come together.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-929701-80-1
Page Count: 392
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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
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