bookshelf

THIRD PARTY

Name: THIRD PARTY
Author: Steven Nemerovski
ISBN: 978-1-68111-129-2

VOL. II: STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

by Steven Nemerovski ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2016

A lively yarn about the gross but tasty sausage-making of politics.

bookshelf

An idealistic third party braves the snake pit of Illinois politics in this second volume of a sprawling trilogy on statehouse skullduggery.

In this continuing saga, the upstart E Party—for Ethics, Economy, and Education—has won a smashing election victory, picking up the Illinois governorship for its dark horse candidate, Baseball Hall-of-Famer Tom Robinson; four of six statewide offices; and the balance of power in the state legislature. Alas, sinister cabals of Democrats and Republicans gather to thwart the party’s program of government ethics, sound budgets, and education reform. The Republicans file for a governor’s race recount, hobbling Tom’s ability to push his agenda; the Robinson administration’s effort to streamline state operations runs afoul of obscure legal strictures; the budget bogs down; a battle royal over redrawing legislative districts opens up an abyss of partisan jockeying; and the education reform bill faces a constitutional challenge by the ACLU (for good reason, as the bill would force high school dropouts to go to school, enter the Army, or do some volunteer gig like AmeriCorps, which sounds like involuntary servitude). Arrayed against the plucky EPers is an array of foes: colluding Republican and Democratic election lawyers; Eddie Cobb, the dark lord of the Democratic National Committee, intent on strangling the EP in its cradle; and Javier Sanchez, a Democratic assemblyman doing Cobb’s dirty work in exchange for help in becoming speaker. Caught in the middle is current Speaker David Kennedy, a master strategist looking to fend off Cobb’s and Sanchez’s attacks and cement his legacy with education reform. There is much heavy-duty wonkery in Nemerovski’s (Third Party, 2016, etc.) novel, but the procedural of election challenges and ballot counting, redistricting maps (they now rely on computer models that would baffle NASA), lobbying, and arcane parliamentary maneuvering is engrossing; the mainly epistolary format of the narrative includes a few overlong memos but mostly unfolds in snappy emails and press reports. Unfortunately, while the EPers hold their own in Springfield, the Republocrats dominate the narrative with their colorful scheming, cackling, vote-stealing, back-stabbing, and womanizing. The EP characters are chiefly boring do-gooders who are forever telling one another how amazing they are. The donkey-elephant show is entertaining enough that readers should hope that the EP never pushes it off the stage.

A lively yarn about the gross but tasty sausage-making of politics.

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-68111-129-2

Page Count: -

Publisher: Wasteland Press

Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2017

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

bookshelf

Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

bookshelf

LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

bookshelf

This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.