Historic implausibilities apart, Erdman appears more interested in bringing the Swiss establishment to book on the score of...
A didactically poor excuse for a thriller from a best-selling author (The Palace; The Panic of '89, etc.) who once set the standard for fiscal entertainments.
In a blend of fact and fancy, complete with lengthy footnotes on arcane source material, Erdman makes Allen Dulles, the OSS's man in WW II Switzerland, a central figure. Among other clandestine activities, Dulles runs a trio of youthful agents he code names the "Swiss Account." Its members include two anti-Nazi nationals, Peter Burckhardt (scion of a banking dynasty) and his sister Felicitas (a brilliant physics student), plus plucky Jewish lass Nancy Reichman (the US vice-consul in Basel). While Dulles gleans valuable intelligence from the three amateurs and their workaday contacts (Per Jacobsson of the BIS, army officers, political police, et al.), he must assuage Washington's increasingly hostile concerns about an ostensible neutral whose commercial/industrial collaboration helps sustain Hitler's war machine. In this course of the ploddingly plotted, suspense-free recital, superspook Dulles and his identikit recruits meet with SS General Schellenberg and his aides, do battle with villainous Soviet operatives, gather incriminating data on indigenous arms-makers, as well as financial institutions, and otherwise aid the cause of the Allies. Early in 1945, the espionage chieftain sends his Swiss Account team across the border and into the snowbound Black Forest to check on Germany's progress toward developing an atomic bomb. With remarkable ease, they return with information enough for Dulles to cripple the Third Reich's nuclear program via pressure on the Swiss government to withhold vital supplies. At which point, the story ends—not with a bang but with an epilogue detailing what happened to the dramatis personae, fictive and real, after V-E Day.
Historic implausibilities apart, Erdman appears more interested in bringing the Swiss establishment to book on the score of its wartime profiteering than in keeping the narrative pot boiling. He succeeds all too well.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0722133588
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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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