Which industry’s next? Ghostwriting?
Robbins’s fifth postmortal work again alternates splendid pulp with thudding prose.
Each Robbins epic features a new venue for bottomless greed. Sin City (2002) took us behind the scenes at Vegas, Never Enough into the secrets of Wall Street and illegal trading, and The Secret into Victoria’s Secret with its nose deep into thongs and Brazilian wax jobs. The mistitled Heat of Passion (it should be Cold Passion) has its stunningly well-written passages (for a Robbins novel) about the secrets of the diamond industry, quite haunting passages of research afloat on a steaming sea of sex, all of it blood-pounding, pelvic, and vulgar. It’s breakfast with a Cartier or Harry Winston catalogue while gobbling a stack of buttery sugared cinnamon toast. Win Liberte was born in a taxicab on the afternoon Kennedy died. His gem of a mother dies when he’s young, and he’s raised by his grandfather and father, who buy rough diamonds wholesale on 47th Street and sell them as cut stones. Dad remarries, and Win now has an older stepbrother, Leo, who delights in evaluating diamonds while Win cares nothing for the industry. When Dad dies, Win inherits a business handled for him by his uncle and stepbrother while hormonal Win devotes himself to boats and “clits.” But when Uncle loses the company funds and Leo rips him off, Win is left penniless, with all his property under lien—except for a diamond mine in Angola that no one will buy because of the Angolans’ endless civil strife. Win heads for the mine, makes a go of it against vastly bloody odds, then finds himself facing the worldwide De Beers monopoly. “Harold’s” grossest scene is hard to choose, though a standout is Win’s pronging the 18-year-old daughter of his former lover when the mother, who’d once tried to kill him, walks in and wraps her cold fingers around his tool: “My blood ignited and I felt the lead rising in my pencil.”
Which industry’s next? Ghostwriting?Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30002-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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