Read the book before they make the movie.
Life is like the movie business in this lean, funny thriller about a producer scrambling to save her life and career.
In a tale bearing traces of Elmore Leonard and Preston Sturges, author Shannon (a pseudonym “for an award-winning author”) suggests that LA street violence and Burbank studio infighting are the same bloodthirsty sport. Protagonist Ronnie “Raw” Deal, producer at Velocity Pictures, sets a tight plot spinning when she stops by the Tiki Shack Bar to nurse her lacerated ego. She suspects that studio rival Andy Gleason connived to get Brad Pitt to nix Trouble Town, a script she’d backed. Plotting “a clean kill” to get Gleason, Ronnie finds another target for her rage: a giant black man strides into the bar and starts working over a floozy sitting nearby. Ronnie flies into him, finishing him off with a kick to the groin, unaware that she’s humiliated Neon Polk, a hit man who once blasted off part of a man’s sexual equipment when the latter singed Neon’s jacket at a party for the film Thug House. A few days after Ronnie’s attack, Neon grabs his pound of flesh: he rapes her, then orders her to come up with $50,000 or he’ll take her out. Ronnie turns to aspiring screenwriter Ellis Langford. She thinks his script Street Iron reveals an insider’s sense of the urban jungle. If Velocity buys the script, Ronnie hints, might Ellis, a pizza deliveryman, dispatch Neon? Ellis wavers. He’s a former big house resident who wants to go straight. He’s also the prey of two nascent psychopaths he pummeled after they stiffed him on a delivery charge. Soon everyone’s stalking everyone else, as Shannon whips up the pace in a series of quick cuts. Ronnie survives, instincts intact: the escapade will make a great film—she’ll call it Man Eater.
Read the book before they make the movie.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-14976-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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