Powered by a briskly paced and tightly woven storyline, Brownstein’s tale is a relentlessly entertaining amalgam of...
Brownstein’s debut science-fiction novel is a near-future thriller set in an environmentally ravaged and newly independent Florida where the largely technophobic population is bitterly divided over the utilization of robots in society.
The year is 2130—an election year—and the Republic of Florida is a political powder keg. Members of the Futurist Party, who collectively advocate a “robot-infused society,” are trying to get their mayoral candidate, charismatic M. Forrest Newcomb, elected to office. But the opposition is everywhere, virtually ingrained in a largely ignorant, prejudiced and paranoid populace. Gangs of drunken vigilantes roam the streets terrorizing anyone they deem suspicious. Idealistic robotic-engineer Cesar Komenen knows firsthand the benefits of living in a society that embraces technology—his cyber implants compensate for eyes damaged in his youth. Komenen deeply believes in the Futurist Party’s philosophy, and wants nothing more than to live a peaceful and technologically improved existence in Lake Worth with his girlfriend Jewel, who works as dispatcher at a “macroshrimp” and oyster farm. But as Election Day looms, Komenen inadvertently becomes a conspirator in a mind-bogglingly elaborate and far-reaching scheme that includes mass brainwashing, murder and political manipulation of the highest order. While the themes examined aren’t exactly new—Asimov’s I, Robot; Levin’s Stepford Wives; etc.—Brownstein’s vividly detailed descriptions of a planet plagued by global warming are intriguing. His detailed account of the events that led to a fractured United States is simultaneously insightful and provocative. (“The breakup of the USA is a symptom of our distrust of the past.”) Additionally, the novel is complemented by a handful of stylish illustrations by artist Jon Sideriadis.
Powered by a briskly paced and tightly woven storyline, Brownstein’s tale is a relentlessly entertaining amalgam of science-fiction mystery and dystopic thriller, with a healthy dose of satire and social commentary thrown in for good measure.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0983260905
Page Count: 492
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
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