Uproariously funny School-of-Carl-Hiaasen cautionary tale that delivers the one-two punch Mickey Mouse has been begging for.
Another nasty, funny satire from the author of Smokeout (2000), this one taking potshots at a corporation ever so slightly reminiscent of the Walt Disney Company and at a planned community just faintly resembling Disney’s Celebration.
Days away from celebrating its 25-year jubilee, Whipple World is a crass, ludicrously depraved Orlando, Florida, theme park complex run by sleazy reprobates and reformed foot fetishists. Anything can be faked at Whipple World, and people who don't like it might find themselves thrown into a vat of bio-engineered flesh-eating bacteria. The park drives the profits of the larger Whipple World empire, which includes tobacco, pharmaceuticals, cars, broadcasting, and “a record studio known for its work with artists who like to cuss.” Date focuses on two attractions: Wild Dominion, a disastrously themed zoo stocked with predators that eat each other, and Serenity, an aptly deadening ringer for Disney’s famous failure at theming the American small town. As happened at Celebration, some of Serenity’s residents are fighting back. Date’s premise is that Whipple World, under the control of soulless bean-counter chairman Lew Peters, has strayed from the kindly, family-oriented values of its visionary founder, Waldo Emerson Whipple. (The author disregards the historical Walt’s notorious anti-union, red-baiting activities in Hollywood.) Whipple’s niece Emma, a smart, pretty, but disenchanted public-relations executive who resides in Serenity, falls hard for jaded but genuine journalist Ernie Warner, whose attempt to do a puff piece on Serenity falls apart when both see that Serenity is anything but serene. They join the paltry resistance and race to expose the environmental havoc Whipple World has caused deep under Orlando’s water table.
Uproariously funny School-of-Carl-Hiaasen cautionary tale that delivers the one-two punch Mickey Mouse has been begging for.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14815-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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