A brainy, tragicomic subversion of university life, the universe, and everything.
In Weatherford’s lengthy debut sci-fi novel, a jaded academic must conceal a beautiful alien in the most perilous place possible: a second-rate university.
In an introduction, the author begs pardon from anyone offended by his arch portrayal of American campus values. The real joke is that real-life political correctness, academic dogma and anti-intellectualism have surpassed this fiction’s satire. Its plot is a critical retort to Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel Contact, with a lagniappe of the sexy–space-monster movie Species (1995) thrown in. In 2069, America is even more jaded and cynical than it is now. Long Island astronomer John Watters holds a desultory job at a perpetually downsizing New York state university, manning the last vestige of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence project and scanning the cosmos for signals from alien life. Stunningly, he receives a mammoth download of information from 2,000 light years away, including instructions on how to build a device to synthesize an alien visitor from encoded data. Members of the mean, shortsighted, Christian-dominated U.S. government (under glad-handing President John Kennedy Cuomo) try to cover up the signal, but a mysterious billionaire with his own selfish agenda makes humanity’s first contact with aliens possible. By chance, only Watters is present when the alien arrives, in the form of a beautiful, 19-year-old blonde woman. The astronomer attempts to shield the Candide-like innocent from all but a few close confidants, passing her off as “Denise Singleton from Arkansas,” his distant cousin, whom he enrolls at his school. The guileless, enigmatic Denise soon faces the campus’s minefield of power plays and manipulations. As Weatherford highlights the pathologies of academia, he also shows Denise skewering sacred cows with lengthy dialogues about human science, history, race, religion, and culture from an innocent, and alien, point of view. In them, she says that the Big Bang is bunk and that quantum physics is more akin to religious faith than reason; she also naïvely compares the Holocaust to the pitiless wars of extermination that Jews waged against one another in the Old Testament. Such dialogues tend to digress from the narrative as a whole. However, Weatherford’s notions are often frighteningly smart; he even veers sideways for a delicious takedown of the 1946 Frank Capra film It’s a Wonderful Life.
A brainy, tragicomic subversion of university life, the universe, and everything.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615949079
Page Count: 634
Publisher: Durham Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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