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
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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