Ramos y Sanchez’s prose style is flat and unexciting, but the incidents hold attention.
A fantasy of life in the near future, when Hispanics are gathered across the country in 46 walled Quarantine Zones and the U.S. government sends troops to pacify the “terrorists” living there.
Mano lives in a California quarantine zone with his wife Rosa and son Pedro. While Mano is a moderate, he has been leading an insurgency against military outposts charged with the task of peace-keeping in the zones. Much to Mano’s sorrow, the latest rebellion has led to more than 200 insurgent deaths as well as the death of a number of soldiers, and outraged American citizens are now demanding a severe crackdown on the zones—military invasion and “pacification.” Fourteen-year-old Pedro is ambivalent about his father’s role, for on the one hand Mano is a respected leader while on the other he, at least in Pedro’s eyes, seems cowardly and unwilling to engage in guerrilla actions. A radical splinter group called El Frente is also dissatisfied with Mano’s moderate approach to what they see as an intolerable situation, so they begin a campaign of bombing meant to unify the Hispanic minorities—though such a campaign also serves to enrage the Anglo majority. Eight insurgents (The El Paso Eight Hostages) have been caught and sentenced to execution, so El Frente captures eight Anglo hostages and threatens to retaliate. It strains credulity that the last one of the hostages caught just happens to be Sarah Evans, the 15-year-old daughter of the deputy director of the CIA, and she falls in love with Pedro, one of her captors. Ramos y Sanchez (America Libre, 2009) takes us into the logistical difficulties of coordinating a political movement and arranging surreptitious funding. He also makes rigid moral distinctions between those who are trying to do right, especially the saintly Mano, and those demagogues who are calling for more Hispanic blood to be spilled (including President George Whitehead Nixon, great-nephew of a famous 20th-century president).
Ramos y Sanchez’s prose style is flat and unexciting, but the incidents hold attention.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-50776-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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