A passionately cautionary eco-tainment tale that cross-pollinates an impressive garden of genres.
Students and faculty at a rural Ohio college unite against an underhanded industrial mining scheme on protected land—unaware that a larger catastrophe looms.
In this novel, Gilligan University is an enclave of multicultural, progressive thought in Appalachian southern Ohio (those cognizant of the region will recognize a disguised Ohio University). Katja Nickleby was a globe-trotting academic whose posthumously published manuscript Over the Cliff became a 21st-century Silent Spring of climate change. By 2014, her protégé (and former lover), Stefan Friemanis, is a professor at Gilligan, smitten with a female student despite the taboos of such an affair. Meanwhile, another student discovers a dirty scheme by uncouth energy tycoon Jasper Morse to secure mining rights to a small but cherished old-growth forest deeded to the college—despite Gilligan’s vow to embrace “sustainability,” not fossil fuels. DIY investigations by Stefan’s undergraduate friends find vast, Koch brothers–like fortunes hidden offshore by Morse, tentacles of corruption reaching from a Gilligan administrator to the Ohio governor, and a Mafia-like cabal of Cleveland Greek Cypriots (Buckeye State shoutouts, even absurdist ones like that, abound). As events escalate to “monkey wrenching” sabotage and campus riots, the tale unfolds not only via Stefan’s journals, but also through the eyes of Hannah McGibbon, an erstwhile student now looking back from the 2030s—the drastically changed era forecast by Katja (remember her?). Bernard (Hope and Hard Times, 2010) wields a wise and skillful voice in this intricate eco-fiction, even as the narrative goes through more metamorphoses (international thriller, college-town dramedy, dystopian/sci-fi prophecy) than the volatile weather in the wounded world he invokes. Even with one climax on a literal dark and stormy night, the author’s erudite but never dry scholarly voice smooths the rough patches, including a finale/epilogue that’s like another book altogether (one of those many post-apocalypse cautionary yarns at that). Helpful essay inserts, footnotes, endnotes, and even charts and graphs present Bernard’s inconvenient truths.
A passionately cautionary eco-tainment tale that cross-pollinates an impressive garden of genres.Pub Date: April 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-927032-84-8
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Petra Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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