A fast, high-spirited sendup.
Hollywood cashes in on the prediction of a catastrophic earthquake in this comic novel by LA insiders Ulin (Sidewalking, 2015, etc.) and Kolsby (a film and TV writer).
Charlie Richter’s grandfather was the guy who invented the Richter scale, and Charlie has followed in his footsteps. He works for an outfit called the Center for Earthquake Studies, whose multimillion-dollar budget is partially funded by the entertainment industry. “If the Big One hits L.A.,” muses an inside source, “the studios will be in on the ground floor.” This proves prophetic when Charlie’s boss leaks his prediction of a massive quake. While the terrified people of Los Angeles make plans to flee, Hollywood movers and shakers hatch plans for a big-budget earthquake movie. This is great luck for struggling screenwriter Ian Marcus, whose dead-in-the-water screenplay, Ear to the Ground, explores this exact scenario: the turmoil created in LA when a catastrophic earthquake prediction goes public. Retrieved from the slush pile by his girlfriend, studio flunky Grace Gonglewski, Ian’s script is sold for $1 million. While Ian heads out to live the life, Grace gets to know her oddball neighbor, who happens to be seismologist Charlie Richter—the one person focused not on profiting from the disaster but preventing it. Will his plan work? Will the movie be completed in time? Will Los Angeles fall into the sea? According to one character, “In the closing chapter of the second millennium, the smart money was squarely on doom,” but don’t give up yet. The book's 39 short chapters originally appeared in the Los Angeles Reader as a serial in 1995 and '96, and period details abound. The death of Jerry Garcia, for example, is mourned by several characters, including both Charlie and the president of the United States.
A fast, high-spirited sendup.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-939419-73-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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