Didactic novelist Denker (Kinkaid; Judge Spencer Dissents; Robert, My Son; The Choice) takes a detailed look at the Palm Springs approach to detoxificaton. Beautiful, talented, alcoholic Broadway star Kitzi Mills doesn't really want to take the cure, but her closest associates have told her that they've taken all they're going to take, so she caves in and flies out to Palm Springs in the company of her agent and former lover Marvin Morse. Morse is also the father of Kitzi's daughter Alice, but he married a publicist years ago when Kitzi seemed to have succumbed to the unpleasant charms of an elderly Hollywood director. Kitzi checks in to The Retreat, which seems to be pretty much like Betty Ford's celebrity sanitarium, but she reacts badly to the required participation in group therapy. There's a lot she doesn't want to tell, and she finds the endless gut-spilling most trying. Eventually, however, she begins to respond to individuals in the group—particularly to an addicted basketball star and a crusty old reporter whose cure is interrupted by a diagnosis of lung cancer. It takes the full four weeks for Kitzi to get to The Root of It All and then admit that she needs help. A little simple-minded, definitely not for the cynical, but not to be dismissed—its Hollywood approach to the treatment of addiction may well be the way reach people in need of the message.
Pub Date: Dec. 16, 1988
ISBN: 1558173145
Page Count: 446
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1988
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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