Dubris (Weep Not, My Wanton, 2002, etc.), who spent 20 years as a 911 medic, serves up a heap of those proverbial eight...
Paramedic with a poetic soul cruises Manhattan’s mean streets, circa 1978, and gets an education.
When small-town girl Orlie Breton moves from her native Ohio to the East Village, it’s culture shock enough; landing a job as a paramedic in Harlem puts her on sensory overload. Orlie’s brittle first-person narrative puts the reader right over her shoulder in the ambulance, with gruff but easygoing partner Rodale, a.k.a. Rodie. He warns her that none of his partners last, but the duo gets along okay (and shares an affinity for Kerouac), the only tension coming from Rodie’s ex-partner, Miss Montalvo, who resembles a staid schoolmarm but relates to Rodie as a lover. Book’s title dates back to the 16th century (Orlie provides sources) and refers to street people. In Orlie’s new world, the foremost of these are a ubiquitous poet known as the albino, whose provocative verses appear on walls all over the city with increasing frequency, and an expansive drunk called Blind Samuels. On the home front, Orlie’s roommate Kim prowls the nightclub scene with her boyfriend Weenie, trying to advance her rock-music career. Orlie does well enough in Harlem to be promoted to Midtown and morgue duty. Dealing with corpses is only marginally better than dealing with the injured (a call to the subway tracks leads to a man cut in half but alive). At least her new partner, Jones, is more amiable than Rodie, who happens to be his cousin. Orlie earns a nickname—Little Bit—and through a strange series of events is reunited with high-school acquaintance Charlene, then a loser, now “adult” star Melissa Mounds. Orlie’s one brush with fame, via a heroic act, endangers the albino and adds suspense to the finale.
Dubris (Weep Not, My Wanton, 2002, etc.), who spent 20 years as a 911 medic, serves up a heap of those proverbial eight million stories with smoky nostalgia for pre-sanitized Manhattan.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-932360-25-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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