by Saira Rao ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2007
Most people have their own boring jobs to worry about without having to read about someone else’s—at least Miranda Priestly...
The devil wears judicial robes in this unoriginal law clerking exposé, penned by a former clerk to an appeals judge.
Fresh out of Columbia Law School, Sheila is convinced that a federal clerkship for the revered Judge Helga Friedman is the key to a coveted job with the ACLU. But Sheila is unprepared for long work days, harried colleagues and an unreasonable boss. The judge is respected in the legal community for her sharp mind, though she forgets the names of her law clerks on a daily basis and is racially insensitive, calling Sheila Pakistani when she is, in fact, Indian-American. She abuses her administrative staff (a masochistic secretary named Janet and a bizarre, Medieval-obsessed man named Roy) and even cancels lunch hour for her clerks. Several co-clerks quit, only to be replaced by equally competitive candidates, and Sheila comes close to following suit on a number of occasions. But there is something that makes Sheila’s job a bit more bearable—a Yale Law grad named Matthew—though each has a long-distance significant other standing flimsily in the way of love. Rumor has it that a member of the Philadelphia Federal Court is going to be nominated to the Supreme Court, but when Judge Friedman disgraces herself during a car accident, the nod unfortunately goes to a rival judge. Finally, Sheila earns the Judge’s elusive respect through work on a controversial death-row case involving the murder of a Penn student (the description of which is undeniably the most interesting part of the book), scores a coveted interview with the ACLU and, most predictably, ditches her cheating boyfriend in favor of Matthew, her fellow Friedman survivor.
Most people have their own boring jobs to worry about without having to read about someone else’s—at least Miranda Priestly was fun.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1849-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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BOOK REVIEW
by Regina Jackson & Saira Rao
by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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by Donna Tartt
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by Donna Tartt
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott
BOOK REVIEW
by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson
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