A masterpiece of history, music, wonder, and sorrow that capably embraces most of a troubled century. Riveting. It should go...
Pulitzer-winner Hijuelos (Empress of the Splendid Season, 1999, etc.) is at his massively engaging best in this bittersweet life story of a gifted Cuban composer.
Israel Levis—whose Jewish-sounding name will one day make him a prisoner in Buchenwald—is born in 1890 into a Habana household where books, music, science, and religion (his mother is devoutly Catholic, his father a physician and amateur naturalist) all thrive in a wonderful sort of harmony. Little real surprise, then, when at age four little Israel shows himself a musical prodigy—or that his talent grows so rapidly that he is soon performing, winning awards, and composing. What first makes him internationally famous, however, is the one simple song—“Rosas Puras”—that he writes (“pulling that simple melody out of the balmy October air of Habana”) one day in 1928 for Rita Valledares, the singer 12 years his junior whom he’ll love passionately all his life but remain too timid and formal ever to let her know. These two lives—of the portly, kind, gifted composer and the vibrant, pretty singer—lie at the center of the book, but so do the “lives” of Habana and Paris as evoked by Hijuelos: the vibrant, cosmopolitan, lively, sophisticated life of Habana through the 1920s and up to the early 1930s, when Israel finally (times turn bad under the dictator Machado) joins Rita Valledares in Paris and experiences that city’s wealth of liberality, beauty, variety, and inspiration as he composes, drinks, performs, and meets the likes of Ravel, Stravinsky, etc. But this wondrous tale of melodies and cities ends with the Nazi occupation, and in 1947 Levis returns to Habana a broken and disillusioned man, although the six years of his life that do remain will be, in Hijuelos’s hands, among the most moving of all.
A masterpiece of history, music, wonder, and sorrow that capably embraces most of a troubled century. Riveting. It should go far indeed.Pub Date: June 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-017569-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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