A sometimes-exciting but ultimately meandering portrait of a society gone horribly wrong.
In Tadros’ (The War of the Words, 2013, etc.) terrifying future tale, one man resists the total control of the state in a last-ditch attempt to save a world in disarray.
It’s the 23rd century, and the Occidental Union controls the world. Its rulers have successfully brainwashed a poor, blindly dependent public into supporting its supposedly collectivist politic. However, despite its power, the state fails to meet even the basic needs of its population. One man tells of his own personal rebellion as the Occidental Union tries to keep power in an increasingly chaotic world. The disillusioned narrator is inspired by his visits to the idyllic Free Islands, which are home to the last strongholds of the Coptic Orthodox Christian community. With his dog, Anup, he braves disorder, disease and countless adversaries in an attempt to discover the truth behind the state’s secret plan, the aptly named Project United We Fall. As in all dystopian stories, the slow elaboration of the speculative setting is the main thrill here. Tadros’ academic vocabulary and tendency toward explanation lend themselves to such a book, which is ultimately a cautionary tale—a worst-case scenario for an unchecked welfare state and a perverted rhetoric of social justice. Indeed, the old-school liberal philosophy underpinning the book is fairly explicit: Tadros writes that the Union’s ideology of “Scientism–Collectivism searches for the one grand theory to unify everything and everyone. It is the final assault against the individual and individual experience in the pursuit of Enlightenment-driven progress.” Such clear political tensions, featuring obvious “good” and “bad” guys, frequently drown potentially lively action scenes in extended reflections on the merits of individual rights, as exemplified by other thinkers, such as Aldous Huxley and Thomas Hobbes. Even though many readers may agree with these principles, the book’s bold emphasis on them often works against the story.
A sometimes-exciting but ultimately meandering portrait of a society gone horribly wrong.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0987553027
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Nightlight Books
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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