For a writer whose last two novels total some 1,400 pages, Cohen has slimmed down here but still covers a lot of territory.
A New York City moving company gets into trouble when it starts doing evictions in a wide-ranging novel that touches on political, religious, and social issues.
David King’s father survived Buchenwald to open a U.S. furniture-moving business that his son has expanded while ruining his marriage via sex with his manager. As the book opens in 2015, David is divorced, has new teeth and hair plugs, and is awkwardly, comically schmoozing among WASPs at a political fundraiser in the Hamptons. He manages to connect with real estate mogul Fraunces Bower III, a link that will resonate in the novel’s climax. David’s Uncle Shoyl survived Auschwitz, and Shoyl’s grandson, Yoav, joins King’s Moving after compulsory service in the Israeli army. His squad-mate Uri is having a hard time adjusting to civilian life, and he also eventually flies to New York to work for the moving company. All these elements will come together when a Vietnam War veteran named Avery Luter/Imamu Nabi misses too many mortgage payments on the home he inherited from his mother and stages a mini-Occupation as the King moving company receives its first job from the Bower real estate empire—evicting Luter. Cohen (The Book of Numbers, 2015, etc.) shows an impressive knowledge of life in the cab of a moving van and in the ranks of the Israeli Defense Forces. He touches on two wars and two combat zones (counting brief allusions to Afghanistan). He is funny and caustic and has a marvelous snap in his dialogue.
For a writer whose last two novels total some 1,400 pages, Cohen has slimmed down here but still covers a lot of territory.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-59018-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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