An engrossing tale of a lawyer’s determination to legitimize clairvoyance, even if some readers may remain unconvinced.
An attorney who deals in scientific facts must prove the validity of psychic phenomena for a negligence lawsuit involving a girl’s death in this legal drama.
Dave Willard is a California patent lawyer who has no time for “New Age mumbo jumbo,” which his schoolteacher girlfriend, Raven, fully embraces. So he’s surprised when his boss at Bracken & Stevens assigns him a case that will entail arguing in favor of a man’s apparent clairvoyant ability. The suit’s against a county sheriff, who disregarded former CIA psychic spy Steve Manteo’s help in finding a girl, Lucy, who was lost in the mountains during a blistering cold winter. Manteo psychically deduced Lucy’s location, but the sheriff refused to send searchers to that area, where, much later, they found the girl frozen to death. Dave sets his skepticism aside and, in fact, has already had a potential vision—a dream of a car collision that may have occurred afterward. He preps for the trial by interviewing people to establish scientific logic to clairvoyance and authenticate Manteo’s neglected credentials. Unfortunately, a group called Skeptemos, intent on ridding the world of bad science, has someone following Dave with a possibly sinister agenda. Renshaw (Science, Remote Viewing and ESP, 2013, etc.) excels at presenting much of the psychic phenomena in a credible light. Dave, for one, makes the trial about Manteo’s qualifications, including his CIA achievements recognized by the U.S. president. Similarly, Dave’s shift to belief in clairvoyance (he ultimately has another vision filled with World War I images) is gradual, not something that happens instantaneously. But while the narrative plainly explains psychic phenomena, it won’t necessarily sway skeptics. An expert on the stand, for example, expounding on remote viewing, states: “We all are mental space-time travelers” without listing hard facts for support. Grammatical and spelling errors, meanwhile, are hard to ignore, especially name variations (for example, Skeptemos is rendered four ways).
An engrossing tale of a lawyer’s determination to legitimize clairvoyance, even if some readers may remain unconvinced.Pub Date: May 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9966231-0-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Constellation
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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