None
Egomaniacs in fast cars, Armani-clad spoiled rich kids, their movie mogul parents, ``lavishly appointed'' Tinseltown homes, and always-sensational sex—it's Collins romping on her well-trodden but ever-fertile ground. Jordanna Levitt and her pals—precocious, underachieving children of the movie industry's most important and dysfunctional families—are known as ``The Hollywood Five.'' Jordanna is a slut without ambition, Marjorie Sanderson is suicidal, Shep Worth is in the closet, Grant Lennon and Cheryl Landers operate a call girl operation. When she's bounced from the mansion of her producer dad and his pregnant, younger-than-she-is new wife, Jordanna takes a job as the assistant (and later costar) of ``incredibly good- looking'' movie star/director Bobby Rush, the child of a brilliant but cruel famous actor. Their devastating physical attractions and broken homes make the two kindred spirits, but Jordanna's got a problem that even a top Bel Air psychotherapist couldn't solve: She's being hunted by a madman against whom she testified at his trial for murder. Luckily for her, handsome Brooklyn cop Michael Scorsinni has just relocated to L.A. He and a top-notch celebrity reporter for Style Wars, the gorgeous and down-to-earth Kennedy Chase, team up to stop the crime (as well as grapple with their own lives' melodramas) and in so doing, fall in love. All this races in front of a backdrop of superlatives: the hottest clubs, the harshest drugs, the seamiest sex, the meanest mafia, and the prettiest posers. The Hollywood Kids are palimpsests upon which are listed the traumas of the trust fund; Michael and Kennedy are cut from the ``beautiful but damaged'' cloth; supporting characters (the black cop buddy, the lusty Latina newscaster) are straight from Central Casting. Plot, though suspenseful, offers few surprises. Still, it's a Porscheload of fun. It's logical: Hollywood Wives and Hollywood Husbands breed Less Than 9 Zero 210 offspring. (First printing of 500,000; Literary Guild main selection; author tour)
None NonePub Date: Sept. 19, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-66627-4
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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