Golf as pastoral ode? Not for screenwriter Pressfield, whose captivating first novel borrows more from Homer's record of heroic clashes than from Wordsworth's musings on lakes and verdancy. It's 1931, and while the country struggles through the Great Depression, Adele Invergordon of Savannah, Ga., presides over an exhibition match between Walter Hagen and Bobby Jones held at her family's spectacular new coastal course, Krewe Island. To appease Savannah's city fathers, Invergordon is compelled to allow local hero Rannulph Junah to compete alongside the two golf titans for the $20,000 purse. A troubled WW I vet once in possession of ``every virtue of shining Southern manhood,'' Junah has been wandering the globe, searching for enlightenment in the company of Bagger Vance, his companion, confidant, and sage. Reluctant to test his rusty talent against stellar competition, Junah relents only when Vance, a black man, offers to be his caddy. What follows is not so much a report of the match as a sometimes awkward metaphysical fugue that integrates sport, spirituality, and the quest for individual fulfillment. Vance is no average caddy: He's an immortal warrior god who just happens to groove on golf, offering his champion the incontrovertible wisdom of the Authentic Swing while showing him how Hagen and Jones tap into their auras to reach linkster Nirvana. Junah's 36 holes against the dashing Hagen and the quietly brilliant Jones follow a pattern as old as Hellenistic verse: After a shaky start and the requisite sulking, Junah gathers himself and scorches the final 18. Along the way, Vance teaches him to play as if he, his game, and the course were a continuous expression of the examined life. Throughout, Pressfield displays his limber knowledge of a nobler golfing age, when gentleman players wore plus-fours and wielded clubs with hickory shafts. His hymn to the sport is less convincing when his classicism drops acid—Vance sometimes sounds precariously like Timothy Leary—but such lapses are forgivable. Altogether, then, a swift, dandy debut. (Film rights to Jake Eberts)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-14048-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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