The questionable medical practice of German neurologist Dr. Oskar Vogt extends from the 1890's to WW II—and by chronicling those decades in his knowledgeable, droll, and spirited first novel, Spengler offers an entertainment following Europe's history from last century's end to the moment before Nazi defeat. Not a Freudian he, from the outset of his career Dr. Vogt believes genius is a physiological presence in the brain that can be discovered through dissection and analysis—and so his fin-de- siäcle lament may be understandable that ``at a time like ours...there is a general shortage of elite brains available for scientific research.'' To support himself in the highly competitive medical world, Vogt treats neurasthenia—particularly in well-off patients like Margarethe Krupp (of the great industrialist family), whose husband's consuming homosexuality threatens to bring about family scandal and confusion—and reveals Dr. Vogt's ability to survive and flourish by such means as may be available. The times move forward as Dr. Vogt attempts to do the same himself: the reader first glimpses Lenin at an intellectual gathering outside Geneva in 1905; WW I comes and goes (``The recent war was a disgrace as far as brains are concerned''); Bolshevism triumphs; and with the death of Lenin in 1924, it is the by-then-renowned Dr. Vogt who is called upon to make 30,000 microscopic slides from frontal slices of the great leader's brain (``I've never seen such collapsed convolutions'')—with political results that will later lead to richly absurd comedies of jealousy, suspicion, espionage, and paranoia as Russia and Germany draw apart in preparation for WW II, with the aging Dr. Vogt caught up—and dropped (``No, Vogt had really become superfluous'')—by ideological forces as absurd at bottom as his own scientific theories had ever been. If not always limpid in the reading, a brilliantly tapestried and deadpan look at a half-century possibly as hilarious as it was mad.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-374-18502-6
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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