For all the advance hype, investment banker Frey's first novel, an over-the-top Wall Street/Washington thriller that's less imaginative than paranoid, falls far short of blue-chip, let alone blockbuster, status. Andrew Falcon, who has had his wings clipped after a brilliant career as a mergers and acquisitions specialist, is working at a dÇclassÇ job with National Southern Bank (NASO) in Manhattan. Promised a $5-million fee, he readily agrees to quarterback the hostile takeover of Penn-Mar, a giant chemicals enterprise. Predictably, the financial whiz is being manipulated by a wicked group of establishment power-brokers known as The Sevens; the cabal's elite members are conducting a covert campaign to deny the ultraliberal, tax-minded US president a second term. Once the leveraged buyout has closed, they go public with a potentially ruinous environmental suit against Penn-Mar and leak damaging information about NASO's solvency. Meanwhile, agents of The Sevens have murdered the Federal Reserve Board chairman and hamstrung the chief executive with false but credible allegations that he engaged in insider trading. With capital markets in free fall and the global village's financial system in jeopardy, as per plan, The Sevens step in to restore order. Their triumph is complete save for one problem: The otherwise brilliant Falcon has belatedly realized the $40-billion deal was too good to be true, and with assistance from a black, lesbian journalist has got the goods on his puppet masters. In quest of money, Falcon joins forces with The Sevens, waits patiently, and turns on them decisively when their hired gun comes calling at his Vermont hideaway. Michael Erdman and Michael Thomas do this sort of thing ever so much better, and they're more facile writers to boot. The bottom line: standard and poor. (First printing of 200,000; film rights to Paramount; Book-of-the-Month Club featured alternate; $125,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93985-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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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