by Jim Lehrer ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 27, 2010
A pipe dream of a world in which mere mortals can’t imagine any higher honor than dying aboard the Super Chief.
Everyone’s dying to take the Super Chief in TV newsman Lehrer’s 20th novel, which, like his 19th (Oh, Johnny, 2009), is a valentine to the days when life and death seemed simpler, even if the people who lived and died weren’t.
Most Hollywood stars have long since abandoned the railroads by April 1956. But Clark Gable, who hasn’t flown on a civilian aircraft since his wife, Carole Lombard, was killed in a plane crash in 1941, still takes the Super Chief from Chicago to Los Angeles. The King’s routine is so pat that porters who know him can schedule his dinner, his drinks and his assignations with star-struck fans with barely a syllable from him. Gable isn’t the only celebrity on the Super Chief; ex-President Harry S. Truman will board in Kansas City, setting up a memorable non-conversation between the two aging lions. But the real drama revolves around three less distinguished citizens. Hollywood producer Darwin Rinehart is already a has-been at 40. Wheelchair-bound cancer patient Otto Wheeler, a longtime regular aboard the Super Chief, is taking his very last trip to his home town of Bethel, Kan. And Dale L. Lawrence has negotiated privately with a redcap for a sleeper off the company books and a chance to speak to the former President on a matter of life or death. Before the train pulls into Los Angeles, two passengers will be dead by violence, another will be suspected as an imposter and passenger agent Charlie Sanders will find himself cast in the role of accidental detective. This isn’t Murder on the Orient Express, or North by Northwest, which gets prophetically brainstormed in the course of the journey; the plot complications flicker away with the miles. Instead it’s a humane, often gently humorous evocation of an era Lehrer obviously loves and mourns.
A pipe dream of a world in which mere mortals can’t imagine any higher honor than dying aboard the Super Chief.Pub Date: April 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6763-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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