Shaping and cutting would have been helpful, but first-novelist Brady writes with energy and authenticity.
Two guitar-playing Texas brothers come of age in the 1970s and travel parallel paths through the southern music scene.
Sick of his father Big Billy Jay’s abuse and itching to make his fortune, 17-year-old blues boy Sonny Blaine leaves behind the small town of Mingus and heads for Austin with his new Fender guitar. It’s 1967, and Sonny and his group, the White Tornadoes, already have some experience and a broad repertoire, including selections from the recent British Invasion. Supercool band member Johnny Lee Hogan, high yellow bassist who always wears sunglasses, widens the Tornadoes’ appeal to colored clubs as well. Sonny’s only regret is leaving behind beloved brother Walker, likely to bear the brunt of dad’s bad temper in his absence; Sonny gives Walker his prized Broadcaster guitar by way of goodbye. Before long, Walker follows Sonny, and trouble follows Walker in the person of girlfriend Nancy, who claims to be pregnant, and her brother Floyd, who’s angry enough to whale on the young man. Sonny defuses this situation and, after Nancy’s condition turns out to be a false alarm, snags the young woman on the rebound, a situation that does little to further brotherly harmony. (A few years later, Walker returns the favor by sleeping with—though he’s married—the unrequited love of Sonny’s life, Cilla, a musician and the daughter of legendary British guitarist Reg Mountbatten.) Walker marries a blazingly talented singer named Vada, who is equally devoted to him and to cocaine, while Sonny becomes known as Firewalker Blaine, and the story comes all the way to the late 1980s and MTV, with career highs and lows, sibling rivalry, and changing music trends.
Shaping and cutting would have been helpful, but first-novelist Brady writes with energy and authenticity.Pub Date: July 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-9708293-3-7
Page Count: 411
Publisher: Coral Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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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