The narrative nicely counterpoints Daniel’s coming-of-age story with the bewildering, and even endearing, goofiness of this...
A year in the life of an experimental school, nostalgically evoking both politics and the sunset of hippiedom, in the ’70s.
Shreve (Drives Like a Dream, 2005, etc.) uses narrator Daniel Truitt, whose father Pete has recently been fired from his administrative job at a public school in the Midwest. Pete develops the cockamamie idea that he is just the person to establish an alternative school in the heart of Washington, D.C. A former college friend has a house to spare, so the Truitt family moves in, chases away spiders and cockroaches, spruces it up with paint and gets ready for a new chapter of academia. They name the school—located in an old mansion—Our House, after the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song. Trouble is, there’s little demand for a school like Summerhill, based on radical democratic principles and populated with an undereducated faculty. In addition to Daniel’s father, the teaching faculty includes Daniel’s uncle Linc, a refugee from a commune in the Pacific Northwest who arrives in a VW bus emblazoned with advertisements for Kool cigarettes. Linc is married to Cindy (aka Cinnamon), a 30-ish flower child who’s carrying on an affair (with Linc’s understanding) with Tino, the most unrepentant counterculturist of all. Tino is the Complete Anarchist, a great admirer of Chairman Mao and cynic-in-residence at the school. (He even steals UNICEF contributions on Halloween, claiming that all charities are rip-offs.) Needless to say, none of these putative faculty members have sterling academic credentials, but in conjunction with Pete they develop a curriculum that plays to their strengths. Each month features a different course of study—religion class is particularly popular because both Moonies and Mormons are invited in for a debate about marriage. Eventually the school implodes, primarily because of Tino’s indiscretions.
The narrative nicely counterpoints Daniel’s coming-of-age story with the bewildering, and even endearing, goofiness of this memorable time in his—and the country’s—growing up.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-72210-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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
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
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