by Rock Brynner ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 4, 1998
Awkward hybrid of thriller, farce, and environmental polemic. After two treatments of his relationship with his charismatic father Yul (a novel, The Ballad of Habit and Accident, 1980; Yul: The Man Who Would Be King, 1989), Brynner offers a comically improbable, name-dropping spoof involving a New York commercial publishing house reluctantly deciding to add to its fall list a pop-science eco-diatribe announcing the imminent, and unavoidable, extinction of the human race. Terry Bancroft, a mildly neurotic, Smith College Gen-X editorial assistant who, with two years in the business, has already learned to loath all authors, knows that egghead-penned gloom-and-doomers have uneven track records. But when she glances at the first few pages of the unsolicited manuscript of The Doomsday Report, she finds, of course, that she can’t put it down. When her fatuous boss seems unimpressed by her enthusiasm, Bancroft slips copies to Commonwealth’s backbiting editorial board, where the graying, sincere, conveniently widowed CEO Franco Sherman decides that the book has great potential, especially after the be-ribboned US General Shriever warns him that powerful, unnamed forces want it squelched. News of the irreversible end of life, scheduled for 2050, makes Bancroft ditch her sexually monotonous Capitol Hill boyfriend for Sherman’s perversely paternal advances. Doomsday, naturally, conquers the best-seller lists, inspiring people of every stripe to do wild, wacky, murderous things as the end of the world looms. All of this is wonderfully hilarious, and would be just fine if Brynner didn’t take himself so seriously, swamping his campy satire and insider jokes in a self- indulgent flood of eco-dreck that, we eventually discover, might not be as accurate as it sounds. A witty premise mired in tedious, journalistic pessimism about Mother Nature’s numerous aches and pains. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 4, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15919-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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