A literate and literary romp through history and contemporary academia as Parini (The Last Station, The Patch Boys, etc.) gently indicts Christopher Columbus and his fictional protagonist, poet Christopher ``Geno'' Genovese, for their patriarchal misdeeds. A tenured professor at a small Vermont college, 40-year-old Geno, bored with teaching, wants to escape to a warm climate where he can write poems about Columbus. But when his application for a study grant is turned down, and he's ongoingly frustrated with the pettiness of academia—nicely satirized—and with the inevitable misunderstandings of married life, Geno has a brief affair with a student that leads to charges of sexual harassment. Wife Susan, unhappy and dissatisfied, accuses him of being an indifferent father; and his two young sons ignore him. Parallelling Geno's decline and fall is the story of Columbus's equally frustrated search for money and advancement. The similarities between the two men are numerous—both share the same name, both had fathers who failed, both are ambitious dreamers who neglect their wives; and just as Columbus is serendipitously saved by Queen Isabella of Spain, so Geno is equally magnificently rescued: He receives a half-million-dollar tax-free ``genius'' grant from the MacAlastair Foundation. Geno and family head for the Dominican Republic and, on the very Bay of Arrows where Columbus landed, build a house. Here, Geno becomes the quintessential patriarch, bullying his family about. But like Columbus, who turns out to be more sensitive than suspected, Geno—when tried by God and Noam Chomsky, among others, in a magic-realism trial—changes in time. The idyll ends with ``a whelm of conclusiveness,'' and Geno ``sets off, chastened, into life again.'' Witty, imaginative, and refreshing reprise of the now increasingly worked-over Columbus saga, but for all the insights and originality, an ultimately contrived concept.
Pub Date: Aug. 28, 1992
ISBN: 0-8050-1676-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
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.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
