Like a mix tape from a friend: some lackluster patches but also a few bits of magic that you’d never have heard otherwise.
Writers try to spin literary interpretations of pop songs, with some rather catchy results.
Although probably not as revolutionary as the publisher would like to think—Nick Hornby did his own take on this idea not so long ago for McSweeney’s—this is a noble effort to marry pop music to pop writing. The idea is that two dozen contributed short pieces that were inspired by particular songs. The volume begins on a high, albeit raggedy note, with an unpublished slice of down-and-out boozer life by late great rock critic Lester Bangs, inspired by Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May.” Bangs is an undisciplined storyteller—no surprise—but there’s an impressive amount of insight in his lowdown recounting of a man’s hapless encounter with an older whore. Jonathan Lethem contributes a story based on “The National Anthem” that’s good enough as far as it goes but occasionally sounds like a cast-off from one of his recent Brooklyn novels (one does occasionally wish Lethem would return to the schizoid SF he wrote years ago). Much of the collection is taken up by inconsequential riffs from the likes of Lisa Tucker (Pearl Jam), Touré (Bob Marley) and Julianna Baggot (Bruce Springsteen), many of them trying too hard to marry their subject matter to the music: sometimes you can hear the glue tearing loose. Better is a Neal Pollack item that uses a Merle Haggard song for predictably deadpan and hilarious satire on the Chicago alt-country scene, or Judy Budnitz’s “The System,” a perfectly dark fantasia, inspired by Tom Waits’s “Way Down in the Hole,” about a small-town population’s shocking plan to save themselves when their primary business (a prison) seems likely to shut down; it’s akin to something Waits would have written himself, or Shirley Jackson.
Like a mix tape from a friend: some lackluster patches but also a few bits of magic that you’d never have heard otherwise.Pub Date: June 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-7026-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: MTV Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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