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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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