The liberal-minded daughter of American upper-middle-class conservative parents experiences heartache and disillusionment during the Vietnam War era as she moves along a tumultuous course put into motion after she meets and falls in love with a handsome young Frenchman.
In her debut novel, Schiffman brings Joanna Bruckner, about to start her freshman year of college, together with Lucien, who is traveling around the United States playing guitar and making money on street corners. Lucien makes a move on Joanna when he notices she is reading the French-language version of Albert Camus’ The Stranger. In an attempt to establish the pair’s commonality, Schiffman introduces their exchange of French phrases into the text. But the author also strongly implies that the relationship is most likely doomed, which undercuts the tension and suspense; their first evening together, Joanna tells Lucien she believes in free will to make life-altering choices while Lucien responds that he believes in predestination. After separations and painful self-acknowledgment about the nature of their relationship, Joanna becomes involved in an affair with a student of Zen, but ultimately finds no love or consolation with him. She feels she does not have the love of her father, from whom she so greatly desires it. This is brought out in Joanna’s thoughts early in the book, and Lucien says that very thing to her when he makes it clear that she is not the woman who rocks his world the most, even after she surprises him by showing up and staying with him in his hometown of Strasbourg. Joanna comes to a decision about the true meaning of love after a letter bomb—planted in her father’s office because his company produced Agent Orange—seriously injures him. This book, whose evenly paced and well-written action is, however, to a great extent predictable, will take college-educated middle Baby Boomers on a nostalgic trip back to the “crazy Asian war” years of drugs and demonstrations. Schiffman’s colorful descriptions of hippie culture, living spaces and nature evoke images so vivid that the reader will easily see and feel them. A vividly described, if predictable, exploration of an intense era of American history.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460908464
Page Count: 245
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2012
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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