A gorgeous love song to swift cars—parents will want to keep it away from their teenaged sons.
A joyous ride down the rocky road of modern car design, with a pack of inspired lunatics fronted by Christensen (The Sweeps, not reviewed), on a journey to “build the greatest car in the world.”
By the greatest car, what Christensen is really talking about is speed: “I want to keep my dream car’s mission simple: A) Start; B) Hit the horizon.” The designer, Nick Pugh, a prodigy in the car-of-the-future department, speaks convincingly of automotive art (“I want my car to make sense the way a cloud makes sense or a tree, design with nonlinear symmetry. . . . Like a babe who has soft curves but talon nails, who could maybe kill you”), but when Christensen chats up the idea of beauty, he sounds like a junior-high kid trying to convince his mother to subscribe to Playboy for the great fiction it prints. For Christensen splices into this classily hip story of building the Xeno III (the greatest car ever made) his history as a fool for fast cars—a disease he has harbored since he was eight and one that has run through his life like a mighty, naughty river, shaping him, getting him into endless trouble. When a friend ponies up $100,000 for him to build the car, Christensen admits: “I feel what Leopold must have felt when he met Loeb,” and it just gets worse. In tandem the stories proceed: Christensen the young boy frustrated because he never has car enough; Christensen the middle-aged guy frustrated because he never has money enough ($100,000 won’t even buy the front bumpers on the car his team envisions). While the Xeno III does get built, in a stop-and-go process akin to learning the clutch, the real beauty of this story is the extended portrait Christensen paints of the family he grew up with and the family he now inhabits as a husband and father.
A gorgeous love song to swift cars—parents will want to keep it away from their teenaged sons.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26873-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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