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
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It”...
Queen of the summer novel—how could she not be, with all her stories set on an island—Hilderbrand delivers a beguiling ninth (The Castaways, 2009, etc.), featuring romance and mystery on isolated Tuckernuck Island.
The Tate family has had a house on Tuckernuck (just off the coast of swanky Nantucket) for generations. It has been empty for years, but now Birdie wants to spend a quiet mother-daughter week there with Chess before Chess’s wedding to Michael Morgan. Then the unthinkable happens—perfect Chess (beautiful, rich, well-bred food editor of Glamorous Home) dumps the equally perfect Michael. She quits her job, leaves her New York apartment for Birdie’s home in New Canaan, and all without explanation. Then the unraveling continues: Michael dies in a rock-climbing accident, leaving Chess not quite a widow, but devastated, guilty, unreachable in the shell of herself. Birdie invites her younger daughter Tate (a pretty, naïve computer genius) and her own bohemian sister India, whose husband, world-renowned sculptor Bill Bishop, killed himself years ago, to Tuckernuck for the month of July, in the hopes that the three of them can break through to Chess. Hunky Barrett Lee is their caretaker, coming from Nantucket twice a day to bring groceries and take away laundry (idyllic Tuckernuck is remote—no phone, no hot water, no ferry) as he’s also inspiring renewed lust in Tate, who has had a crush on him since she was a kid. The author jumps between the four women—Tate and her blossoming relationship with Barrett, India and her relationship with Lula Simpson, a painter at the Academy where India is a curator, Birdie, who is surprised by the recent kindnesses of ex-husband Grant, and finally Chess, who in her journal is uncoiling the sordid, sad circumstances of her break with normal life and Michael’s death.
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It” beach book of the summer.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-04387-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel—and she scores strongly with it.
The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettie—and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettie in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them—because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer—Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery—that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters—thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully—with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility—and battered-ness—of love.
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.Pub Date: June 28, 1982
ISBN: 0151191549
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
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