Evidently even John Steinbeck "takes a walk" now and then. This is it. We hope he doesn't continue to walk downhill. For here is a book that will inevitably be a bitter disappointment to those who have put John Steinbeck at the top of the roster of American writers today. Always before his bums, his down and outers, his "under-privileged", his Okies, his itinerant workers, his drifters have invoked a certain magnetic fascination rootet in the sheer love of their creator for his creations. Some have accused Steinbeck of being sentimental about his people. Nobody could accuse him of being sentimental about any of the unprepossessing aggregation of unpleasing humanity brought together at a wayside safe from which a short line bus operates. There's the proprietor, driver of the bus, Juan- least objectionable, perhaps, and warmed by a spirit of charity. There's his temperamental, possessive and violent wife, Alice, who takes out her spleen on all and sundry, with flies and the downtrodden hired girl, Norma, as chief victims. There's Pimples-most unpalatable of adolescents, who is a mechanic of sorts, sex ridden and depraved. And then there are the passengers held over while the bus is repaired- an unsavory lot, from the Pritchads, who hated each other but tried to put up a front as a united family, to the salesman with a suitcase full of rather morbidly unpleasant tricks, and the girl whose sex lure provided the flash which set off the latent dynamite. The story is a slight one, and rarely does it emerge from the mire of fleshly obsession, the mark of language and motives and concentration on the physical. A thoroughly distasteful and unpleasant book, unredeemed by the flash- the spark that to most justified anything John Steinbeck wrote. Because what he does well, he does so extraordinarily well, it is all the more appalling when he descends to the depths of vulgarity.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1946
ISBN: 0142437875
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1946
Cussler's most adult, least comic-strip-y entry yet in the Dirk Pitt sea sagas. Gone is the outlandish plotting of Treasure (1988), when Dirk found Cleopatra's barge in Texas, and of Sahara (199), which unearthed Lincoln's body in a Confederate sub—buried in the desert sands. Now, in his 11th outing, Dirk Pitt and his National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) fight villainous megalomaniac Arthur Dorsett, head of Dorsett Consolidated Mining, which holds the world's wealthiest diamond-mine empire. Pitt and his team must fight as well Dorsett's three daughters, the coldly beauteous Amazonian Boudicca, whose giant strength dwarfs Dirk's; the elegant but heartless Deirdre; and the star-crossed zoologist Maeve, whose bastard twins are held captive by grandfather Arthur so that Maeve will infiltrate NUMA and report on its investigation of his holdings—even though Dirk recently saved Maeve and Deirdre's lives in the Antarctic. First, however, Cussler takes us back to 1856 and a typhoon-battered British clipper ship, the Gladiator, that sinks in uncharted seas off Australia; only eight survive, including Jess Dorsett "the highwayman," a dandyish-looking convict, who discovers raw diamonds when stranded on an uninhabited island. From this arises the Dorsett empire, bent on undermining the world market in diamonds by dumping a colossal backlog of stones and colored gems into its vast chain of jewelry stores and, with one blow, toppling De Beers and all rivals. Worse, Arthur Dorsett excavates by high-energy-pulsed ultrasound, and when ultrasound from all four of his island mines (one on Gladiator Island, near New Zealand, another by Easter Island, the last two in the North Pacific Ocean) happen to converge, a killer shock wave destroys all marine and human life for 30 kilometers around, and now threatens over a million people in Hawaii—unless Dirk Pitt's aging body can hold it back. Tireless mechanical nomenclature, but furious storytelling.
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80297-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
Readers here get both: “Life was cruel. And hilarious all at once.”
A sprawling family saga with a zesty Mexican-American accent from Cisneros, author of, most recently, Woman Hollering Creek (1991).
Every summer, all three Reyes brothers drive with their wives and children from Chicago to Mexico City to visit their parents. Narrator Lala begins with a particularly dreadful trip during which “the Awful Grandmother” reveals a shameful secret from her favorite son’s past to humiliate her detested daughter-in-law. These are Lala’s parents, and Lala then rolls the narrative back, goaded by a scolding second voice whose identity we learn later, to tell us how a desolate, abandoned girl named Soledad became the Awful Grandmother. Soledad comes from a family of shawl-makers, and her most significant possession is a rebozo caramelo, a silk shawl whose striped design, when she unfurls it after her husband’s death, evokes “the past . . . the days to come. All swirling together like the stripes.” Wearing it years later to her parents’ 30th anniversary, Lala brings the fringe to her lips and tastes “cooked pumpkin familiar and comforting and good, reminding me I’m connected to so many people, so many.” Cisneros’ keen eye enlivens descriptions of everything from Chicago’s famed Maxwell Street flea market to Soledad’s sun-stroked house on Destiny Street. (The author riffs playfully throughout on the double meaning of destino, as either “destiny” or “destination”; it’s hard to imagine that the simultaneous Spanish-language edition will be as stylistically original as this casually bilingual text.) Melodrama abounds, and the narrator doesn’t disdain her tale’s links to Mexico’s famed telenovelas. In one of many entertaining footnotes, vehicles for historical and biographical background as well as the author’s opinions, she insists that those TV soap operas merely “[emulat] Mexican life.” The only way to cope is with a robust sense of humor. As Lala’s friend Viva says, “You’re the author of the telenovela of your life. Comedy or tragedy? Choose.”
Readers here get both: “Life was cruel. And hilarious all at once.”Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-679-43554-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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