Hilariously cynical take on small-time ethnic politicos and other craven creeps in the City of Brotherly Love, from an award-winning former Philadelphia Inquirer columnist. Abandoning the mawkish sentimentality of Third and Indiana (1994), his mean-streets social-realist debut, Lopez now goes for a fiercely funny epic that pits the feckless members of a creaking, contentedly sleazy old-time South Philly political machine against idealistic, terminally beautiful Assistant D.A. Lisa Savitch and her street-wise, ``part-time'' FBI agent sidekick, Mike Muldoon. Lopez uses a deliriously complicated plot to deliver a stinging satire. It seems that former US Senator Augie Sangiamo, who listens to Sinatra while chowing down with his cronies on pasta and ``gravy'' every Sunday afternoon, wants to maintain his weakening hold on his turbulent, working-class neighborhood by using illegal campaign funds drawn from Atlantic City casinos to buy elections for the grandly corrupt State Representative William ``Ham'' Flaherty and Common Pleas Judge Isadore ``Izzy'' Weiner. The ambitious D.A., who once sent Sangiamo to jail, wants Savitch, an athletic, cigarette-puffing import from Boston who can't quite manage the local patois, to ``bring me the heads of these dinosaurs so we can stuff them, mount them and put them on display at the Academy of Natural Science.'' Savitch is more interested in investigating a release of toxic fumes from the city's oil refinery, and, meanwhile, Muldoon can't keep his eyes off Savitch's legs. Throughut, comically vile insiders square off against stiff, feckless outsiders and only the morally upright seem to suffer. As Muldoon says, ``we end up with bribery, a white-collar scandal, a public health epidemic, two murders, thirty-seven felony counts. Where's our bonus?'' While it lacks the depth of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire, Lopez's scathingly sarcastic top-to-bottom exploration of urban corruption overwhelms with dead-on characterizations and lingering belly-laughs. (First printing of 50,000; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-15-100264-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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