. . . but fails to follow through. Bunn (The Great Divide, 2000, etc.) aims for a higher purpose than you’re likely to find...
Financial thriller about a shadowy cabal of bankers who plot an assault on America’s monetary system.
Just another cashed-out high-tech millionaire with too much time on his hands and more ambition than he knows what to do with, Wynn Bryant long ago promised his older sister, Sybel, that he would give her anything she wanted for her birthday each year. Since Sybel is deeply involved with an ecumenical group called Sant’Egidio, these birthday gifts have often involved help for the poor. But this year, Sybel makes a different request: Wynn must go to her husband, Grant, who happens to be the governor of Florida, and do whatever he says. Wynn subsequently agrees to run for a seat in the House of Representatives—a seat just opened since its current occupant is in a coma—with one mission from Grant: vote against the upcoming Jubilee Amendment, a bill that would relieve Third World countries of their financial debts to the US. Meanwhile, a group of politicians aligned with Sant’Egidio has enlisted Jackie Havilland, a rudderless employee at an Orlando detective agency, to investigate the actions of an immensely powerful hedge-fund banker, Pavel Hayek, who is part of a movement dedicated to the defeat of the Jubilee Amendment. Wynn and Jackie slowly become privy to a Ludlum-esque world-destroyer of a conspiracy: an operation called Tsunami, in which some immensely wealthy financiers use the shady but very legal practice of hedge-fund–trading to knock out the foundation of the American dollar and make a killing in the panic that’s sure to follow. While he’s at it, the author makes a few thoughtful points about the darkly immoral consequences of today’s deregulated international banking bazaars and provides an excellent setup . . .
. . . but fails to follow through. Bunn (The Great Divide, 2000, etc.) aims for a higher purpose than you’re likely to find in most thrillers. Still, this one’s mix of heavily technical detail and strong characters (à la David Lindsey) doesn’t save it from ultimately falling flat..Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-49616-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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