From the author of Same Bed, Different Dreams (1991), a tale of the Hollywood misadventures of a screenwriting upstart: in the tradition of—but hardly on a par with—Michael Tolkin's The Player (1988) and Peter Lefcourt's The Deal (1991). Sheldon Green moves from Cleveland to Los Angeles with the hopes of writing and directing feature films. No one will hire him but a copy supply center, so he becomes a toner salesman and is rejected by every girl he asks out while he waits for his big break. It comes when Sheldon's boss uses him to deliver messages to Philip S. Fried, a washed-up producer now managing parking lots. Sheldon defects to Phil's company to answer phones. When the opportunity arises to produce a movie with Max Planck, another desperate producer looking for cheap talent, and Ethan Albright, a consultant for Japanese investors, Sheldon and Phil jump at it. Sheldon, having just taken a screenwriting fundamentals course, will create the script (for very little money), while Max will arrange the rest. In order to keep costs down, Sheldon comes up with a story that requires neither star nor special effects. Mitch and Me chronicles the goofy adventures of a middle-American family that mistakenly believes a lost chimpanzee is the foreign exchange student they'd been expecting. The ho-hum novel peps up with the introduction of on-the-set mayhem, including some strained personal relations and problems with the two chimps playing Mitch (one dies before the end). Gross can be funny: Sheldon's passing ideas for movies, always with wacky titles; the oddball cast and crew of the movie; and some stray one-liners and situations are all cute. However, sometimes it seems as though the central plot is simply a showcase for stray cleverness, and the author goes out of his way to avoid real conflict. Thin and lackluster.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-922811-21-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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