This multilevel book can be read for fun as an enjoyable farce or mined for deeper insights.
Under the threat of global annihilation by aliens, a journalist, together with an ever growing band of mismatched people, hunts for a mysterious individual known only as Basil.
Johnson (What Does God Do from 9 to 5, 2016, etc.) has somehow taken the philosophy of Hegel and the experiments of Milgram that demonstrate there are only five or six degrees of separation between any two people; mixed in equal parts Marx Brothers, Watergate, Douglas Adams; tagged his characters with monikers straight out of Dickens, film noir, and Snow White; and wound up with a snide, witty, completely entertaining romp through human nature and all its foibles. The adventure begins on the moon. Journalist Dak Blayzak plans to interview a genetically engineered brainiac whose family consists of multiple self-cloned children. Instead, Blayzak winds up imprisoned for knocking down a robot, propositioned by a number of clones who want to escape with him, and ultimately dead (though rumors of his demise are greatly exaggerated). While dead, he boards a shuttle to the dark side of the moon, where he awakes to a gun-toting expert on a language no one else speaks. The Professor, as he is known, says they must find an alien named Basil in 10 days or Earth will be destroyed. The aliens communicate through a hand-held device using pictograms only the Professor can decipher. Half-convinced, Blayzak goes along with the Professor and tracks down each subsequent link to Basil. Eventually, the links lead to a supersecret cabal that runs the world, an action-and-humor–packed showdown, a return of the clones, pillories, big band music, and a tremendous explosion. Johnson, a philosophy professor, has more up his sleeve than great writing and a funny, extremely readable story; readers will also have fun searching between the lines for deeper implications and references.
This multilevel book can be read for fun as an enjoyable farce or mined for deeper insights.Pub Date: April 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5442-2224-0
Page Count: 142
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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