Known for his satirical novels about British academics (Rates of Exchange, 1983, etc.), Bradbury here examines the way we treat cultural icons. The icon in question is Dr. Bazlo Criminale, a product of Mitteleuropa and the world's most publicized (yet most mysterious) philosopher. Bradbury's narrator is Francis Jay, a brash young London journalist hired by a TV company to get the goods on Criminale for a feature on Great Thinkers of the Age of Glasnost. He travels first to Vienna, where he is stonewalled by Professor Otto Codicil, Criminale's biographer (who really wrote the book is another mystery); but in Budapest Criminale's publisher and former mistress, glamorous Hazy Ildiko, seeing her chance to shop in the West (it's 1990, the Wall is down, Hungarians now live to shop), leads Francis to the glitzy conference on an Italian lake where Criminale both appears and disappears (his disappearances are legendary). Francis talks to the great man but learns little more than that Criminale is ``dirty with history'' like everybody else (his conduct during the Hungarian uprising was questionable), and readers looking for a literary detective story will be disappointed. What they get instead is Bradbury's presentation of ``culture as spectacle.'' ``Nobody in the West [takes] writing seriously. What they take seriously are conferences.'' Not new points, but Bradbury piles it on, giving us three more conferences, a Book Fair in Buenos Aires, and a Booker prize-giving dinner in London. As for Criminale, it's unclear whether Bradbury is hunting with the satirists or running with the hypemongers, for the satyr with the secret Swiss bank accounts is also linked repeatedly to Lukacs and Heidegger; not surprisingly, the portrait is out of focus. Ultimately, then, a dull and curiously empty work, pretty much lacking Bradbury's customary comic edge.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-670-84677-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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