Outlandish and frequently hilarious.
An unlikely premise—a polar bear makes it big in Los Angeles and then crashes—but somehow Cooper (Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes, 2006, etc.) makes it work.
The book is categorized as a graphic novel, but it’s more of a novella with illustrations. Beaufort the polar bear lives at the Beaufort Sea and is separated from his mother when an ice floe breaks off due to global warming. Attracted to the glitz and glitter of Los Angeles, he hitches down to southern California and nabs a job waiting tables at the trendy restaurant Nobu. There he’s discovered by Leonardo DiCaprio and offered the role of Leo’s sidekick in the film Separation of Oil and State. The reviews are sensational, and Beaufort rides the wave of celebrity and its over-the-top lifestyle. He hooks up with supermodel Svava and starts turning down plum roles—like the polar bear in The Golden Compass 2: The Return of Whimsy—because he doesn’t want to be typecast. (To his chagrin, the role eventually goes to Bigfoot.) Beaufort starts hangin’ out with the likes of Demi and Ashton and hits the party circuit hard. His creative juices start to flow, and his ego expands, when he decides that what he really wants to do is write and direct, so he starts crafting a screenplay called Bear, a movie about the war in Iraq starring Shia LaBeouf as a Marine from Alaska “who gets called out by his bunkmates when they discover he secretly sleeps with a stuffed bear that he also totes in his pack throughout their deployment.” Unfortunately, the movie bombs, and Beaufort becomes a pariah in Tinseltown—after all, you’re only as good as your last film. In his depression and search for meaning, Beaufort turns to Scientology. Although he has a few commercial auditions—including one for Klondike Frozen Novelties—Beaufort feels his life spinning out of control, but he pulls himself together, enters a 12-step program for alcoholism and addiction and writes a one-bear show that becomes an off-Broadway hit.
Outlandish and frequently hilarious.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-935554-07-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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