Michaelos's first novel is the story—told through letters and diary entries—of Freud's treatment of his first hysteria patient- -here known as Lucy O. The young and just-married Freud (it's 1886) believes that Lucy suffers from childhood seduction by her imperious and unpleasant father; but in the treatment (through hypnosis) that he embarks upon, the ambitious young doctor has an even deeper quarry: he suspects that the repressed forces of prehistoric myth themselves are surfacing to produce the attractive young girl's hysteria. ``The patient is, in fact,'' writes Freud, ``greatly discontented with being a girl,'' and, under hypnosis, Lucy recites long passages of a poem about fleet-footed Atalanta, the mythic girl who, alone among male hunters, took part in the slaying of the Calydonian Boar. As he does his own literary research into the myth of that hunt from pre-antiquity, Freud finds himself (following Lucy's father's death in an apparent hunting accident) so drawn to his patient that he, too, seduces her—with results that will lead him later to Greece and the site of ancient Delphi, where the alluring wife of Heinrich Schliemann, discover of the ruins of ancient Troy, is working on her own archaeological dig and caring for the still-mysterious—and pregnant—Lucy. In Greece, there will be cataclysm (volcano), sex (oral), childbirth (stillborn), and lots of talk (``But we don't have time today to probe the mystery of the emergence of literature from mythology'') before Freud will at last return to Vienna and his patiently waiting wife, Martha. Akin to other recent dawn-of-psychoanalysis entertainments— When Nietzsche Wept, The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P.—this one, struggling ambitiously to keep up its level of drama, will interest those armchair Freud-sleuths able to overlook a certain amount of woodenness (asks Mrs. Schliemann when meeting the young doctor, ```Then you subscribe completely to the Helmholtz canon of determinism and materialism?''').
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-42405-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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