A crowd-pleasing if not-especially-enlightening ``spiritual journey,'' Ö la The Celestine Prophecy, is taken by a surprisingly engaging cast of characters. Middle-aged history professor John McGowan, a self-described ``non-believer,'' lives a quiet existence with his wife, Sarah, and their two young sons near the backwoods Pennsylvania college where he teachesuntil the day he receives a certified letter from Washington attorney James Stanton informing him of a sudden ``inheritance'' that he must collect in person at Stanton's D.C. office. The inheritance proves to be a cigar box containing three letters, including one from his father, archaeologist Bill McGowan, who left the States for a dig in Israel when John was five and never returned. The letters document Bill's discovery ofand eventual loss ofthe ``Messiah Stones,'' three carved tablets given to Moses by Jehovah prophesying the final coming of the Messiah. When an overwhelmed John returns home and shows the letters to Sarah, the two decide they have no choice but to fulfill what seems to be their shared destiny: to re-find the stones. They head for Israel with Martha, a colleague of John's and a seeker of spirituality in her own right; once in Jerusalem, they meet up with Avi, a best friend of Bill's who helped him find the stones 40 years before. En route to their final goal, the gang receives encouraging signs from the Messiah in the form of angel-like ``messengers,'' and ultimately hooks up with Simon, who brings them to Bill McGowan's gravesite and helps them all, quite literally, see the light. First-time author Benig may not be the second coming of James Redfield, but this lightweight adventure can be a fun jaunt nonetheless. (First printing of 150,000; $100,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-44749-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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