Cynical, caustic, and amusing: an ensemble story that uses Big Tobacco as a wedge to reveal much of the ugliness of...
From Date (Speedweek, 1999, etc.), a Florida journalist on his way to being the distaff Carl Hiaasen, another bumpy burlesque lampooning the events surrounding the Sunshine State’s landmark legislation that opened the tobacco industry to billion-dollar lawsuits.
Governor Bolling Waites, a politically savvy, speargun-wielding fictional stand-in for Lawton Chiles, has just vetoed a Florida bill that would have gotten the tobacco industry off the hook for causing millions of cancer deaths. Bartholomew Simons, the unspeakably vile Nietzsche-quoting CEO of RJH, whose cool Larry Lama cartoon character (remember Joe Camel?) is selling millions of cigarettes to teenagers, has opened his checkbook to buy as many Florida state senators as possible so they’ll vote to override the veto. He’s also lined up a suspect young political consultant, Murphy Moran, the lethally beautiful lobbyist Ruth Ann Bronson, and Colonel Marvin Lambert, a lunatic Rogue Warrior–type security samurai, who must locate a purloined memo that, if made public, would doom the tobacco industry’s cause. Missing among the dozens of comically, if not revoltingly, corrupt lawmakers lining up to be bought is State Senator Dolly Nichols, a Republican who thinks that government shouldn’t legislate public choice. New to money politics is Jeena Golden, a drop-dead gorgeous blond (she advises her protégé to dress like a slut and never wear underwear) hired by Bronson to push for Big Tobacco. Her former boyfriend is Governor Waites’s right-hand man, FBI agent Johnny Espinosa, who has slowly assembled a collection of covertly recorded conversations that might land every state politician in the slammer. Date brings these and other venal Floridians together, shuffles the deck and deals out a series of increasingly ludicrous scenes whose comic inventiveness underscores his point: that against big money interests, it’s a miracle that anyone can do the right thing.
Cynical, caustic, and amusing: an ensemble story that uses Big Tobacco as a wedge to reveal much of the ugliness of Florida’s political scene, little of its charm and saving graces.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-14649-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
