Just the right mix of psychological incisiveness and historical drama: a bold story of displaced people and misdirected...
After a bizarre murder, the powder keg that is 1920s Palestine threatens to explode.
Writing a thriller masquerading as a literary novel, Wilson (The Hiding Room, 1995, etc.) hurls us right into the thick of a Palestine still healing from the wounds of WWI, chafing under British rule, and fast swelling with Zionist activists. All starts off on a beautiful summer night that’s shattered by the murder of an Orthodox Jewish man inexplicably dressed in Arab garb. Witness to the killing are Mark and Joyce Bloomberg—Mark a Jewish painter who’s been drummed out of the London scene by scathing reviews, and Joyce an American gentile dilettante with a strangely fixated devotion to the Zionist cause. The third side of this triangle is Robert Kirsch, a British policeman who is just as blase about his Jewish heritage as Mark is, and also just as attracted to the nervy, live-wire Joyce. Kirsch’s superior, an old-school, stiff-upper-lip type of the most enjoyable sort, proclaims himself a fan of Mark’s work and hires him to head off into the Transjordan to paint, conveniently leaving the door open for Kirsch and Joyce’s doomed affair. As often happens in books where writers have a larger agenda than simply puzzling out a crime, the murder investigation quickly becomes a quite desultory affair, with the primary suspect—a young Arab boy who may have been having an affair with the victim—being hidden from the cops by those who would prefer Jerusalem not explode in riots upon his arrest. What really interests Wilson, and reasonably so, is the ambivalent nature of the newly arrived Jews in Palestine, the barely concealed disdain they’re held in by the stretched-thin British authorities and the razor’s edge all of them walk.
Just the right mix of psychological incisiveness and historical drama: a bold story of displaced people and misdirected passions.Pub Date: June 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-42209-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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
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
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