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
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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