A novelist forcing cleverness is like a QB forcing throws into double coverage: prospects bleak.
The famed sportswriter’s blitz of one-liners sacks his latest football novel.
It’s not that the jokes are never funny; it’s just that they so seldom stop. Again and again—as was the case in Bump and Run (2000), to which this is a sequel—the effect is to strip a scene of its drama, or to undercut character credibility, the sine qua non of maintaining reader interest. Too bad, because Jack Molloy—a man with a code in a world that has no time for such abstractions—is a character people might like if they were allowed to take him seriously. More than a year has passed since Molloy’s New York Hawks, the team he inherited from his father, posted that stirring victory in the Super Bowl. Aside from swanning around in Europe, Molloy has done little with his life since, and nothing that could be considered positive. On the negative side, he’s managed to make a kind of Faustian bargain with a robber baron named Dick Miles, and when he wakes up to the starkness of its implications, he discovers he’s got scads of money and no football team. True enough, the title on the door says President, but controlling interest is owned by the rapscallion who euchred him out of it. Sobered by his own fecklessness, Molloy dedicates himself to retrieving what he once swore he’d never part with. Not easy. Shrewd as well as ruthless, Miles has attacked the Molloy support system, systematically dismantling it: friend and coach allowed to seek Green Bay pastures; secretary and all-purpose loyalist fired for bogus reasons; and so on. But Miles is about to learn what others have before him—it’s a mistake to underestimate an aroused Molloy.
A novelist forcing cleverness is like a QB forcing throws into double coverage: prospects bleak.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15082-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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