The tepid tale of a prostitution ring—courtesy of —Harvard,— the pseudonym adopted by four alums who’ve joined forces to serve up a novel set at their august alma mater. Toni Isaacs is a gung-ho reporter for the Crimson who gets a tip from an exotic dancer that Harvard students are moonlighting as prostitutes. Instantly and rather bizarrely obsessed with getting the story, Toni places an ad in a local paper touting an escort service staffed by students. She chats up the many callers who respond and hears rumors about an outfit called Class Ring, which proclaims its university ties by using Veritas-embossed condoms. Toni gets a call from a woman hinting that she wants work, but the caller is in fact from Dora Givens, one of the masterminds of Class Ring. She lures foolish Toni into a trap that culminates in Toni getting busted for solicitation, an episode that jeopardizes her standing at Harvard but strengthens her resolve to get the story. Under the guise of reporting on the company that Dora works for, she conspicuously drops her quarry’s name, after which she’s approached by a scruffy scientist who seems to want to leak something. But he disappears (is kidnaped?) before their scheduled meeting. A provocative picture pilfered from his mother’s garbage leads Toni to a bona-fide student hooker. When she subsequently discovers the dead body of one of her most handsome and charismatic classmates, his diary reveals that he too was a prostitute and that his secret lover was not only a popular professor but Dora’s partner in Class Ring. Intrepid Toni has unearthed the far-flung conspiracy. The calculated blend of Harvard ambiance and plentiful sex isn’t enough to make this effort fly, however workmanlike. Its characters are uniformly flat and unengaging, and its byzantine plot, while admirably coherent, is too busy and far- fetched to satisfy.
Pub Date: May 13, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-44858-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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