An undistinguished debut cozy. Though bandleader Duchin and old pro Wilson (Justice at Risk, 1999, etc.) know the score,...
An increasing worry to his pals (Jackie Kennedy, Joe DiMaggio, Truman Capote, George Plimpton et al.), society bandleader Peter Damon views his life darkly these days. He just can’t shake the post-homicidal blues that followed the murder of his wife two years ago. Now it’s October 1963, and Peter’s seesawing about a gig in San Francisco, a city dear to his departed Diana. “You must begin to let go,” lisps Truman Capote. “And finally say goodbye,” adds Jackie ever so gently. So Peter sets off for the posh Fairmont Hotel, booked there for three weeks by its chatelaine, Charlene Mitford Hogan Statz. Basking in the warmth of her welcome, Peter begins to relax until, glancing out a window, he sees (gulp) Diana! Later that night he sees her again—or her doppelgänger—this time in the arms of society scoundrel Terence Hamilton Collier III, a man about to dance his final foxtrot. With Peter at the piano, and the band in full attack, the lights of the Gold Room go out. When they come on again, Collier has an ice pick protruding from his chest. Did Diana’s double jam it in? Or was it one of a dozen others who cordially despised the late smoothie? It’s clearly a case for Hercules Platt, the LAPD’s lone black detective, and with Peter’s help he solves it in a manner dimly suggesting Dame Agatha’s artful Belgian.
An undistinguished debut cozy. Though bandleader Duchin and old pro Wilson (Justice at Risk, 1999, etc.) know the score, their playing’s flat.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-425-18645-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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