In the age-old tradition of romancers who refuse to let facts stand in the way of a great story, first-novelist Winegardner (Prophet of the Sandlots, 1990) hits the outside corner with an evocative reprise of Mexican baseball's single season in the sun. It's 1946, and sportswriter Frank Hollinger is reporting on the five Pasquel brothers' attempt to create a major-league rival south of the border. And, with access to apparently unlimited amounts of dinero, los hermanos (under the direction of free- spending Jorge, the consort of Maria Felix) give El Norte a run for its money. The brothers, in this pre-Jackie Robinson era, use generous bonuses and megabuck contracts to lure stateside professionals (Danny Gardella, Max Lanier, Sal Maglie, Mickey Owen), who have few difficulties teaming up with stars from the Negro leagues and Latin America. The problems are with the gun- toting Pasquels, who load the roster of the club representing Veracruz (their hometown) with the best talent and otherwise put paid to any notion that Mexican baseball is to be organized. Despite the best efforts of sinister jefes to fix the season's outcome, the imported players give loyal fans in several hinterland cities an unexpectedly close pennant race and a consistently high caliber of competition, while the visiting mercenaries also get to witness such mythic moments as the home run hit by Babe Ruth in his last turn at bat. Off the field, the hired hands pine for absent sweethearts, engage in torrid love affairs with local lasses, and party with the hard-living likes of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The idyll ends abruptly as a change in the capital's political climate leaves the Pasquels out in the cold. Years later, those who were involved have mostly fond memories of their sojourns, which they share in interviews with Hollinger, the older, wiser (somewhat), and forthrightly nostalgic narrator. An absorbing, episodic account of a brief fiesta that still lights up the summer game's storied past.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-86636-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Back to a Jurassic Park sideshow for another immensely entertaining adventure, this fashioned from the loose ends of Crichton's 1990 bestseller. Six years after the lethal rampage that closed the primordial zoo offshore Costa Rica, there are reports of strange beasts in widely separated Central American venues. Intrigued by the rumors, Richard Levine, a brilliant but arrogant paleontologist, goes in search of what he hopes will prove a lost world. Aided by state-of- the-art equipment, Levine finds a likely Costa Rican outpostbut quickly comes to grief, having disregarded the warnings of mathematician Ian Malcolm (the sequel's only holdover character). Malcolm and engineer Doc Thorne organize a rescue mission whose ranks include mechanical whiz Eddie Carr and Sarah Harding, a biologist doing fieldwork with predatory mammals in East Africa. The party of four is unexpectedly augmented by two children, Kelly Curtis, a 13-year-old "brainer," and Arby Benton, a black computer genius, age 11. Once on the coastal island, the deliverance crew soon links up with an unchastened Levine and locates the hush-hush genetics lab complex used to stock the ill- fated Jurassic Park with triceratops, tyrannosaurs, velociraptors, etc. Meanwhile, a mad amoral scientist and his own group, in pursuit of extinct creatures for biotech experiments, have also landed on the mysterious island. As it turns out, the prehistoric fauna is hostile to outsiders, and so the good guys as well as their malefic counterparts spend considerable time running through the triple-canopy jungle in justifiable terror. The far-from-dumb brutes exact a gruesomely heavy toll before the infinitely resourceful white-hat interlopers make their final breakout. Pell-mell action and hairbreadth escapes, plus periodic commentary on the uses and abuses of science: the admirable Crichton keeps the pot boiling throughout.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41946-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975
ISBN: 0385007515
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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