Strong story, immense fun, but shortchanged on passion.
Driscoll’s second novel strives for a more sustained focus and an even gutsier grip on the reader than Lucky Man, Lucky Woman (1998). His writing remains fresh as ever.
Stardog hurtles along like a terrific movie, with the author creating wonderful visual images while padding the plot with the usual novelistic background stuff that will get cut from the screenplay. This approach is entertaining, but readers are unlikely to be moved by any of it; Driscoll tries for emotion at the end, but a dose of climactic melodrama befogs his hopes and the story’s deepest possibilities. Earl Patrick Godfrey, a schoolbus driver and recovering alcoholic, reads that ex-wife Diane has put his glorious customized 1977 candy-apple red Ranchero 500 up for sale. Earl happens to be driving by his old house, where the Ranchero sits. Suddenly he stops the bus, leaves the kids, plows through snow to the garage and steals his former but still blazingly beautiful pickup. Using Diane’s Mastercard, he steals $200 from her account and takes his old beauty for a last ride, an illegal but glorious outing. At a Chippewa casino on the Upper Michigan Peninsula, he’s fed a straight flush worth $12,870 by casino dealer Miranda Mtn., who tells him to meet her later at a hotel. They join forces, and Miranda makes it clear that their stolen pot is a stake in doubling their take by betting everything on the red or black at a Canadian casino and then again at Atlantic City. Thus the story becomes a road movie as Earl and Miranda get to know each other—and Miranda’s quite an eccentric. What’s more, since abandoning her casino job overnight, she’s being chased by casino bounty hunters who know she cheated them. Unfortunately, Miranda’s character is never fully exploited, and her tie to Earl seems less than heartfelt.
Strong story, immense fun, but shortchanged on passion.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7894-2626-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: DK Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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