Talky, tear-jerking thriller from screenwriter/novelist Briley (The Traitors, 1969, etc.). Would you believe a blond, blue-eyed Jewish-American beauty who meets, captivates, and weds a Saudi Arabian princeling on orders from Israeli intelligence? That this brainy, worldly young woman remains tucked away in a desert harem for almost two decades before she's called upon to serve the murky cause of her masters in Tel Aviv? That the long-married lady genuinely regrets betraying her handsome husband? Then Briley has a book for you. At the behest of Mossad, Lisa Cooper contrives to run into Le'ith Safadi while both are students at UCLA during the late 1970s. The dashing young MBA candidate (whose given name means young lion) is soon besotted and, against the urgent advice of his US minders, he takes her to wife. While not of the royal house, the Safadis wield considerable influence within the oil-rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Although the unblushing bride eventually wins over the senior members of Le'ith's extended family, she doesn't fool her villainous, ambitious brother-in-law Rashid, who suspects her from the start. Meanwhile, the ever volatile Middle East is convulsed by events ranging from Israel's invasion of Lebanon through the Gulf War. At length, after the Jewish State and the PLO take their first tentative steps toward peace, Lisa is called upon to sell out Le'ith (who's negotiating with his traditional enemies to join forces in an economic development project that could benefit the whole region). One fine day in Cairo, she betrays him, albeit with a heavy heart. Barely escaping the ensuing violence with her own life. Lisa learns (after arriving in Israel) that Le'ith has survived as well. At this point, the in-from-the-cold agent realizes she truly loves her no longer young lion and returns to Saudi Arabia for a dramatically implausible reunion. Danielle Steel meets Robert Ludlum without any particularly gainful result.
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-15235-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997
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
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.
