The Los Angeles-based Lange, a local TV news anchor, drops more names than clues in a first thriller that rarely feels like more than a paint-by-numbers exercise. The title character is Devin Bradshaw, a 34-year-old former womenswear designer who gave up her burgeoning career when she snagged wealthy Paul Bradshaw away from his first wife. Paul is the owner of a large sports apparel company that manufactures a line called ``Pulled Together''—from which five percent of the retail prices are supposed to go to social programs in South-Central Los Angeles. Devin is planning to leave her 60-year-old husband and return to work (even though ``Having every material thing in the world that she could possibly desire was certainly seductive....It was every woman's dream'') when he's shot and killed in his car. In Lange's two-dimensional sense of things, Paul is the Hard-Hearted Businessman; his secretary and former lover is the Woman Scorned; his brother, Sam, is the Jealous Underachiever; a Pulled Together worker attempting to unionize the shop is an Angry Black Man; and so forth. Devin, however, is never satisfactorily defined, even in clichÇ terms, since the reader is meant to wonder whether or not she's the murderer. There is some campy fun here, not in terms of the supposed mystery, which is crystal-clear from the start, but from Lange's relentless use of real-life people and places to add gloss to the story. When Paul and Devin throw a fancy shindig, the Clintons show up, as do the Mosbachers (``albeit Republicans''); and when Devin dines at Spago, she encounters Cher ``with her bagel-boy boyfriend,'' Linda Evangelista, Wynona Ryder, and Heidi Fleiss. She even befriends a fashion model and discovers lesbian chic. Meanwhile, Lange certainly keeps things moving—the chapters are brief, and the cast is large. Entertaining for stargazers, but no big prize. (Literary Guild alternate selection)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80191-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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
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
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