An obvious and silly fable about baseball's first female superstar. Screenwriter and author Bechard (The Second Greatest Story Ever Told, 1991) begins in the year 2000, when Commissioner Dan Quayle rules a game in which many changes have taken hold. None is more unsettling, though, than the Supreme Court's decision allowing 23-year-old Louise ``Balls'' Gehrig to play first base for one of the league's newest franchises, the upstart Manhattan Meteorites. While the court says ``go,'' many fans say ``no''—among them Joey, a loudmouth sports radio call-in show habituÇ, and Arnold Loiten, a cranky Atlanta sports writer. These two merely voice their displeasure, but others use stronger methods—like the crazies who send dismembered dolls and bloodied uniforms as fan mail to the distaff dynamo. Still, the season progresses, and the Meteorites are piling up wins en route to a heavily foreshadowed playoff with the powerhouse Atlanta Braves. Naturally, Louise heads the charge, repeatedly foiling Braves star hurler Rocky Goetz—who, we later discover, has been sending items more dangerous than brush-back pitches Louise's way. As if the author hasn't thrown us enough beanballs, he piles it on with two unbearable romantic subplots, one involving Louise's 40ish mother, Maragaret, and veteran Meteorites slugger Bob Dixon, and the other pairing Louise with ace Yankees hurler Cole Robinson. Forget about the utter implausibility of any 5'6'-tall person, woman or man, excelling in a position requiring Bunyonesque size and strength, or an expansion team going all the way. This story's real fault lies in the author's inability to hold back from such cutesy-poo shenanigans as locker-room crushes and constant barrages of egregious name-dropping (Dave Winfield as Yankees manager?). Bechard pitches some okay stuff but lacks control.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-452-27294-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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