A swift, unusually entertaining journey through present-day public relations.
Holden (Second that Emotion, 2012) offers a novel about a possible new Messiah—and a company that must sell the world on the concept.
After a successful career at advertising firm CREATIF, 51-year-old Mal Thomas is set to retire in the Blue Ridge Mountains with his dear wife, Mara. Although he left on poor terms with his former colleague Oliver “OMG” Melville Grouse III, he’s ready to relax—that is, until a former client lures him out of retirement with an incredible offer. Mal, along with others from his old firm, are taken by private jet to Miami to meet with Alfredo Baptiste, a Cuban refugee who leads BAPTIST, a massive company involved in “seemingly every key area of American business and industry.” He’s worked with CREATIF in the past, and now he has a lucrative assignment for them—if they’re willing to take it. In short, he wants to tell the world that a young man from Brazil named Sebastian is the Messiah. It’s an odd offer, to say the least, but after some discussion (and some reflection on Alfredo’s willingness to pay them lots of money), Mal and his team agree to the challenge. They tackle it in an ever-so-modern way, using social media, celebrities, and their own advertising savvy. The story follows an oddly believable path; if a company were trying to sell the world on a Messiah, this might very well be how they would do it. The plot does takes time to develop—many initial pages are devoted to Mal’s background, including his childhood in England, and a rundown of his colleagues—but once things get moving, the book is hard to put down. Readers will quickly ascertain that there are two ways for the story to go: either Sebastian truly is the Messiah and there’s a supernatural climax in store, or some sort of hoax is afoot and readers must try to ascertain the rub of it all. Figuring this out proves to be an enjoyable adventure as seen through the eyes of a most unlikely hero.
A swift, unusually entertaining journey through present-day public relations.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9978970-0-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Clean Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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