Historian and novelist Ali (Redemption, 1991, etc.) charts the lives of a family of activists from the days of the Russian Revolution to the post-Wall malaise of our times. Ali is one of those rare creatures, an academic historian who has made a fairly successful transition to writing serious novels. His earlier fiction’s playfulness belied the writer’s training and roots, but this latest comes as a reminder of his Oxford/New Left Review background. The protagonist and sometime narrator is Vladimir, a former East German dissident who now finds himself as dismayed by the Germany that followed unification as he was by the half-Germany in which he lived and worked before. Vlady, as he’s often called, has been fired from his teaching post because he still believes in a democratic form of socialism, ironically the same ideal that brought him problems in the DDR. His son Karl is a rising apparatchik in the post-ideological Social Democrats, his wife has left him for reasons that will be revealed only toward novel’s end, and his old friends are dying or changing sides in a discomfiting manner. Vlady’s main response is to try to decipher the mysteries of his recently deceased mother’s past: Was his father a truly heroic figure of the old Communist movement, or something more sinister? What he—ll find, of course, is not what he expected. Ali tells this story in a pervasively melancholy tone leavened by occasional witty details such as a Sotheby’s auction whose centerpiece is a 17th-century silk condom reputed to have belonged to Louis XIV. But he’s too much of a historian to make the people here come to life as characters. Rather, they represent a series of political positions arbitrarily assigned quotas of tics that pass for psychology. Can a thoughtful and well-written novel also be a failure, and a bit of a bore? Here’s the answer.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1998
ISBN: 1-900850-10-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Arcadia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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