A novel featuring warmed-over nostalgia among the academic set.
A high-stakes techno-thriller about researchers in 1960s Berkeley, California.
Graduate student Will Getz is at the top of his game. He has a supportive professor at one of the pre-eminent research institutions in the country; a beautiful, talented girlfriend; and a future that seems full of promise—until he makes one giant mistake. His attempt to synthesize pfaffidine, a naturally occurring plant compound with potential uses in cancer treatments, hits a wall when he can’t repeat the 12th and final step in his experiment. Rather than admit failure, he commits the ultimate sin against science by falsifying his results, setting off a calamitous chain of events that will eventually claim more than one life. The term “sin” is apt here, as Rodricks’ novel is Christ-haunted, to borrow a term that author Flannery O’Connor once applied to her native South. It features at least one lapsed Catholic priest, a host of newly secular scientists (among them Will and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Gina), a nominal Zen monk, and a dangerous cult that appropriates some of Christianity’s more macabre iconography. Throughout, the author keeps the plot moving at a quick pace, but never sacrifices character development. Readers learn, for instance, about Will’s and Gina’s fraught family lives—their commonalities, no doubt, serve to bring them closer. But for all the novel’s vaunted civil rights and counterculture sympathies (it name-checks the Rev. Martin Luther King and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and pillories the Vietnam War), its female characters get short shrift. Although Gina and another woman, Elaine, occasionally speak about subjects other than men, their lives are wholly defined by their associations with them, primarily Will himself. Rodricks’ prose is authoritative, particularly when he describes the science behind pfaffidine, and it’s often pleasurable to read. However, he stalks too-easy quarry; other authors have already adequately eulogized the lost idealism of the ’60s, and Rodricks neither adds to that literature nor runs counter to its chief claims.
A novel featuring warmed-over nostalgia among the academic set.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463623951
Page Count: 404
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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