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
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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