A dreary, un-Disneyesque fairy tale that delivers leaden agitprop.
America’s holy of holies—Disneyland—is desecrated by big government in this strident right-wing satire.
In the year 2030 a metastasized federal government combines tyrannical means (citizens must get computer chips implanted in their hands) and leftish ends (they shut down talk radio). Its worst crime is the nationalization of Disneyland, once “a shining city on a hill” built by “the tools of free thought and free enterprise,” now a desolation of joyless bureaucracy and liberal preachiness. At the once-magical theme park, smiling staffers have become surly union stiffs, hotel guests are rationed three pieces of toilet paper a day for their no-flow commodes and health-conscious snack concessions sell nothing but fruit, yogurt and bran muffins. The attractions have been re-engineered to impart politically correct group-think: the Star Wars extravaganza has been shuttered because of pressure from the World Peace Coalition, Sleeping Beauty Castle has become Sleeping Woman Castle, animatronic parrots denounce Western imperialism and Buzz Lightyear’s Astro-Diplomacy ride encourages youngsters to appease dictators by dispensing foreign aid from a spaceship. Fernald and Favish pen touching odes to the fun and loveliness of Old Disneyland—especially the “casual serenity” of the monorail—to set off their cartoon vision of a monstrous public sector of the future. To them, government is part pacifist Darth Vader, part wicked stepmother who won’t let us eat junk food, part tax-hungry ogre that “sucks the life out of its people and endeavors to eat out their substance as the decades unfold.” It all makes for a tiresome fable in which labored whimsy serves mainly as an excuse for shrill political harangues. (Why would bureaucrats give Snow White an eighth dwarf named Angry? Because, the authors explain, “the driven, narcissistic flow of purely negative emotion fuels the machine of totalitarian omnipotence that the government has built.”) The lurid dystopia is less convincing as a prophecy of liberal fascism than as a caricature of Tea Party paranoia.
A dreary, un-Disneyesque fairy tale that delivers leaden agitprop.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-1451534634
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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