Wry and pitch-black send-up of media hubris.
A newspaper editor loathed by most people in the civilized world gets his comeuppance.
Second-novelist Chalmers (Who’s Who in Hell, 2002) isn’t so much interested this time around with the ink-stained wretches of Fleet Street but instead starts at the top—before taking a nosedive into the real world. Edward Miller runs a London tabloid of the sort owned by Rupert Murdoch, a paper regularly taking swipes at immigrants and gays when not providing salacious details about celebrities and politicians. A self-satisfied fat cat, penny-pinching hypocrite, and serial philanderer, Ed starts off a workday—his wedding anniversary, actually—with a quickie in the office storeroom, and things go quickly downhill from there. By the next morning, Ed will be alone in his house (his wife off shagging the next-door neighbor), dressed only in a urine-soaked towel, doing lines of cocaine while an inquisitive reporter from a rival—liberal—paper asks him about his racial attitudes and why he spray-painted “WANNKER” [sic] on his neighbor’s car. With the press, police, and lawyers closing in, Ed shaves his head and, on the advice of an old schoolmate (who oddly doesn’t hate him), jets off to Barcelona to work as an instructor for an ESL school that regularly hires educated drifters, no questions asked. For a time, Chalmers seems to have tapped into a real goldmine with his cast of disaffected expats, all on the run from something they’d rather not talk about and slowly bonding with this odd newcomer, who looks nothing like the incriminating photos still splashed all over the papers. But author Chalmers, perhaps not realizing what a good thing he has going and wishing to punish Ed further, sends him on the run again, straight into a rather painful subplot at a Florida freakshow. Things wrap up quite nicely, even if the final fourth is a bit of a waste.
Wry and pitch-black send-up of media hubris.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-4160-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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
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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