Darkly comic take on the “greed is good” shenanigans that led up to the recent financial apocalypse.
Young Manhattan matron comes up with a unique solution to emerging threats to her family’s future.
There is something just a bit off about Daisy Greenbaum. In spite of her incredible wealth, good looks and bright twin daughters, she does not quite fit in among skeletal lady-lunchers in her Upper East Side social scene. While she manages for the most part to mask her inner rage, filling her dull days with charity projects, the burgeoning 2008 financial crisis finally offers her long-dormant inner sociopath a chance to run free. Her husband Dick is a Wall Street math whiz who has figured out how to make a killing in credit default swaps. But Dick, although deeply flawed, is beginning to fret over the long-term financial and ethical implications of his work for The Bank (think Goldman Sachs). He can see the end coming and wants to go to the authorities. But when he reaches out to his boss John, a preppy tool who has none of Dick’s scruples, John threatens to ruin him for even thinking of exposing them. Enter Daisy, who, unbeknownst to Dick, drugs and murders John while making it look like a suicide. So Dick gets promoted. Daisy is then vexed to discover that Dick’s former mistress, the Lady Petra Kingly, is once again sniffing around her husband. Trophy wife to a much-older man who is about to get caught running an elaborate Ponzi scheme, Lady Petra sees Dick as her only chance at a lucrative future. Dick, while no longer interested in Petra, fears that she will reveal his secrets. Daisy once again takes matters in hand, just as Dick starts to realize, with an appropriate amount of gratitude, what she is up to. Meanwhile, an ambitious young blogger, Candy Ross Rose, sees a career-making opportunity in taking down The Bank. She fixates on seducing none other than Dick Greenbaum. Big mistake. Jong-Fast’s edgy follow-up to Normal Girl (2000) seems meant to be a broad social satire about the über-wealthy, but it’s held back by the underwritten Daisy, whose murderous impulses are the most interesting thing about her.
Darkly comic take on the “greed is good” shenanigans that led up to the recent financial apocalypse.Pub Date: April 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-50189-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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