In 23 stories, poems, and jottings, the fifties teen icon gets the full treatment hitherto reserved for Peabody and Ebersole's Mondo tributes to Elvis, Barbie, and Marilyn. Ever since his death at 24 in a car crash, the essence of Dean's cult standing has always been his unfinished status, his promise cut short so young, so it makes sense for the authors to use unusual freedom in reinventing him. Michael Hemingson takes him deep into Anne Rice territory; Stephanie Hart entangles him with the gorgeously misunderstood Cal Trask; Lewis Shiner shows that it's Dean, not Elvis, who had run-ins with space aliens; Jack C. Haldeman imagines him as a race-car driver (with Sal Mineo as his Boy Wonder mechanic and Natalie Wood as a pert Saturday Evening Post reporter); Louisa Ermelino packs him off to modern-day Afghanistan; and James Finney Boylan, in the volume's most amusing conceit, unmasks him as Jimmy Dean, the Sausage King. For a (barely) different point of view, try David Plumb's sketch of Dean's fictitious son, Michael Marton's testimonial from his high-school English teacher, Hilary Howard's discovery that Dean is her new guardian angel (``You are hereby free of all your neurotic hang-ups. Have a cigarette''), or Bentley Little's search for the lug wrench Dean tossed out of the frame in Rebel Without a Cause. All through these pieces, though—and in the excerpts from Ed Graczyk's Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Edwin Corley's Farewell My Slightly Tarnished Hero, and the poems by Ai, Reuben Jackson, Tino Villanueva, and Terence Winch—the tabula rasa is remarkably consistent: a surly yet sensitive sex machine mounted on fast cars or cycles, alienated as all getout. In fact, the immitigably 50's Dean is so stiff and unyielding in story after story that all too often he seems like an interloper at his own homage.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14121-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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