We suspect Joyce himself would be pleased with this production, a boon for scholars and general readers alike. (Requires iOS...
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan and crew find themselves well-served in a new app that blends Joyce’s text with its Greek inspiration.
A classic of literary modernism, Ulysses is now over 100 years old. It benefits nicely from the new-tech treatment of the modern app, though the developers might have done even more with it; the annotations, for instance, are numerous but light and sometimes too glancing. Generally, though, they’re helpful, especially for readers without a suitably Joycean cultural background: In case the point is missed in the text itself, it doesn’t take much in the way of those annotations to see that Joyce is parodying the Catholic Mass in the opening paragraphs, and the editors even connect the “white corpuscles” of the first page to the holy proceedings. The app contains an abridged recording of the text, as well as period recordings of some of the music (“A Nation Once Again,” “In Old Madrid” and so forth) that Joyce’s characters enjoy during the course of that storied June day in 1904. A particularly welcome lagniappe is the text of Homer’s Odyssey, the ur-epic underlying Joyce’s own book. Getting around the Greek text, broken into its constituent books, is easy enough, but less so the English: The navigation leads to the headers of the three parts but not to the chapters within them, which, of course, are keyed to the Greek, while the bookmarking feature is sufficient but approximate in a text that is continuous and without pagination. Useful, again, to readers who haven’t explored the ground is a set of photographs providing visual annotations of such things as Martello towers and the exact appearance of 7 Eccles St. before it was bulldozed in the 1960s. One hopes that in future editions these extras might be better hyperlinked to the main text so that readers don’t have to skip around so much, though the serendipity involved leads to some pleasant discoveries among the phantasmal mirth and ghostly light of Joyce’s brilliant words. A search function would be nice, too.
We suspect Joyce himself would be pleased with this production, a boon for scholars and general readers alike. (Requires iOS 6 and above.)Pub Date: June 1, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Naxos Digital Services, Ltd.
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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