Gossipy roman-Ö-clef about the duel between the visionary founder of an upstart California computer company and the fatuous, guilt-ridden mainstream marketing executive who wants to steal the company from him. That technology journalist Hutsko worked with former Apple chairman Jim Sculley, and that the fictional Via Computer in this snickering comedy of business manners is a dead-ringer for Apple, make it tempting to equate Sculley with his fictional counterpart Matthew Locke. Indeed, the opening passages seem to be a thinly disguised rerun of the boardroom coup staged by Sculley that ousted Apple founder Steven Jobs, depicted here as wealthy, idealistic, but socially naive Peter Jones, whose obsessive attachment to a balky handheld computer he wants to be the Next Big Thing distracts him from the management problems plaguing his company. But Hutsko’s late-’90s setting differs dramatically from Apple’s in the ’80s, when Sculley took over. Here, the Internet is a familiar, all-too-easily accessed medium where Locke’s maimed wife Greta can indulge in virtual sex with a pseudonymous lover, while Locke sends unencrypted e-mails to William Harrell, the megalomaniacal head of the IBM-like International Computer Products. The deal that binds Locke to Harrell is a scheme to merge Via Computer with ICP, so that Harrell can wrest control of the computer industry away from Microsoft stand-in PCSoft. Even if this made sense, Hutsko’s rationale that business is a game played badly by petty guys who can’t find satisfaction in sex, society, or family does not compute: by the time Jones finds a substitute father figure in ousted ICP chief Byron Holmes and leads an assault to take back his company, the narrative has lost its momentum. As is often the case with thinly fictionalized tell-alls, the true details about sex, money, and management incompetence add up to somewhat less than a powerful story. Occasionally titillating, mostly stale insider-stuff. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-86872-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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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