Uneven dramatization of America's technological triumph at the expense of her ideals.
Preachy and grandly tragic portrait of the artist as a young A-bomb-maker.
Lanky, unquestionably brilliant US atom bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, long a fictional model for geniuses evil, good, and merely misunderstood, gets an elegiac treatment here. We meet him on the desolate banks of the Rio Grande, on the site of the future Los Alamos labs, seeking solace and healing air for his tubercular lungs. A figure of dreamy, doomed complexity, with an avowed Marxist wife (who soon lets motherhood quell her revolutionary passions), Oppenheimer, a Berkeley physics professor with an obsession to understand the world through scholarship, soon lets his mystical appreciation of nature, his righteous loathing of the Nazi war machine, and his fierce desire to be the mensch his immigrant family wanted, lead him not only to create the ghastliest symbol of technological hubris, but to suffer through the betrayal of colleagues and the humiliation of Red-baiting investigations that ultimately damn him as an untrustworthy security risk. Expatriate Thackara's (The Book of Kings, 1999, etc.) fictional retelling of gee-whiz brainstorming sessions with Fermi, Bethe, and the diabolical Teller, and of science-for-science's-sake conflicts with the bluntly crude General Leslie Groves, have moments of excitement, culminating in the weirdly beautiful horror of the Point Zero test explosion. There's a great story here to tell, but through struggling to wring every irony and bitter truth from somewhat stilted scenes, and through being lugubriously fascinated with Oppenheimer's capacity for suffering, Thackara pads his telling with windy explications and clumsy Creative Writing prose (" . . . in the acute relief of letting himself be caught up in their pride for him . . . Robert suddenly knew what he must do").
Uneven dramatization of America's technological triumph at the expense of her ideals.Pub Date: March 15, 2001
ISBN: 1-58567-111-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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