Fun stuff, this oddball mating of The Godfather and The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.
In Gold’s debut, small-time Brooklyn hood Howard "Windows" Fenster sells weed and collects vigorish for capo Vinnie Five-Five Spoleto, but Howard’s passion is the Penguin Classics library he inherited from his mob accountant father.
Then Scrunchy Cho, another hoodlum, kills a working girl in Vinnie’s Sheepshead Bay sporting house. That murder ignites a war among Five-Five’s gang, Crazy Bo Moon’s Triad, and Vlad the Impaler’s Brighton Beach Russians. Vinnie’s first casualties are Double Down (shot) and Garlic (pieces stuffed in garbage bags), and so worried Howard, "a half-Jew and as wholly ambivalent," moves out of his sister Judith’s basement. Howard loves Judith, and he’s disappearing to protect her, but he has no place to hide until he meets Ariel, an "ultraconventional girl" in a "pretentious cafe." The love connection’s immediate, and Howard moves into Ariel’s basement while remaining on call for Vinnie. Howard quickly learns well-educated, sophisticated Ariel is obsessed with bondage and sadomasochism, and when she discovers that the monosyllabic and often vulgar Howard is an erudite autodidact rather than the brute of her fantasies, the love affair takes a left turn. Gold has good fun with amoral mobsters like the psychopathic Irish-Italian called IRA, the gluttonous Frankie Hog, and crazy Pauli Bones, who "destroys money in the crematorium of financial idiocy." Dialogue seems spot-on, especially if mob guys rely heavily on f-bombs, but the setting’s more commentary than descriptive. There’s comedy to be had, especially as Howard helps Mrs. Five-Five dispose of a body while contemplating references to Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Irony too, as Howard mopes through a critique of capitalism versus communism, characterizes mob violence as being "as meaningless and pointless as…Vietnam and Iraq," and debates Orwell versus Dostoyevsky with Ivan, the lone Russian mobster who doesn’t want to kill him.
Fun stuff, this oddball mating of The Godfather and The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.Pub Date: June 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-57962-443-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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
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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