Bombay lawyer George Sansi's third case (The Ganja Coast, 1995, etc.) pits him against the unstoppably wealthy and unspeakably corrupt industrialist behind a monstrous chemical disaster. Compared to the Union Carbide accident at Bhopal, the disaster caused by phosphorus spilled into the Ganges at Varanasi is no big deal—a mere 1,100 dead and 4,000 wounded. But to Sansi's old friend Rupe Seshan, newly appointed minister for environment, it's exactly the routine nature of the tragedy that's most insidious. Determined to expose the culprits before their criminal carelessness becomes a model for corporate greed, she appoints incorruptible Supreme Court Judge Kusheed Pilot to head a commission and, with the help of circumspect hints about deporting Sansi's lover, Times of India reporter Annie Ginnaro, bullies him into heading the investigation. It's no secret who's behind the spill—wily Madhuri Amlani, founder and CEO of Renown Oil and dozens of other indefensible, untouchable industries. But Amlani, who's had six months to get braced for the investigation, has armored himself with an army of cat's paws, cutouts, forged documents, bribes, and perjuries so audacious that Sansi hasn't a hope of getting at him. His latest stunt: getting indiscreet photos of Rupe and Sansi—who've now finally consummated their childhood infatuation—which are bound to compromise Sansi and chase the investigation off the front pages, and Annie from her job at the Times when she's asked to write up the story. Running rings around his stifled children, the gangster former boyfriend of his son Joshi's starlet inamorata (a sadly abortive subplot, this one), and the naive American sharpies planning to capitalize Renown Oil out from under him, Amlani steamrolls Sansi, Rupe, and Judge Pilot, clearly unconquerable by anyone with the minutest scruples. Will stolid Sansi put aside his legal training to reel him in? In the end, Sansi stays technically virtuous as ever, but casting him as the unmoved eye of this teeming, miasmal Indian storm makes his latest adventure his richest yet.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-449-90770-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
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
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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