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HAYWIRE

Name: HAYWIRE
Author: James Mills
ISBN: 0-446-51619-8

by James Mills ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 22, 1995

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A Father's Day nightmare: a son pressed into service as an illegal currency courier disappears with $100 million in bearer bonds sewn into his stuffed lion. Just what is Charley Fleming doing with that kind of money? It all goes back to his father's decision in his DEA days to run a covert operation killing thousands of acres of Peruvian coca, and then covering his involvement by fingering Satan-worshipping Peruvian presidential hopeful Gen. Enrique Alvarez as the culprit who turned on the growers. Years later, Doug Fleming and his well-groomed wife and child are living a Reader's Digest life, interrupted only by Charley's scary intimations of demons and angels, when Doug's computer business suddenly goes broke, and, desperate to recoup his losses, he agrees to let Charley carry the lion for Clifford Landau—a Venezuelan ``soft drink'' manufacturer—in return for a percentage that will buy him back into his suburban Arcadia. Who would suspect a nine-year-old of involvement in a deal like this, and what could go wrong with his parents sitting just a few rows ahead of him on the flight from Caracas to JFK? Answer: The DEA pulls Doug and Karen Fleming off the plane in Miami, and when it lands in New York, Charley's vanished, along with his mascot. Don't go public, the feds hiss at Doug, or Landau will vanish, too, and we'll never get him back. But Doug goes public—AP, CNN, the works—and Landau doesn't vanish: He gets executed. Doug circles the world on the run from the DEA and its cronies, scouring every luggage compartment in the sky and every airport men's room on the ground. But it's not until a hideously overlong explanation from an old DEA buddy that he realizes what the dullest reader will have guessed long ago.... Veteran Mills (The Power, 1990; the nonfictional Underground Empire, 1986, etc.) has put together a staunchly action-packed male weepie, expertly shifting its hapless hero from the frying pan to a series of hotter and hotter fires.

Pub Date: June 22, 1995

ISBN: 0-446-51619-8

Page Count: 408

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.

Pub Date: June 1, 1985

ISBN: 068487122X

Page Count: 872

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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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.