A darkly witty, smartly demythifying Western by Trevanian, best known for his ever-atypical novels in various genres (The Summer of Katya, 1983, etc.). Twenty Mile, Wyoming, is a sun-bleached ghost town and narrow-gauge train stop halfway between the Surprise Lode and the boomtown of Destiny. Trevanian takes the sociological measure of Twenty Mile back in 1898, when it was slipping into oblivion but still inhabited by 15 residents and a tiny handful of businesses: a livery stable, a three-stall whorehouse, the Mercantile, a tonsorial palace, a boardinghouse, and not too much more. Saturday nights find silver miners from the Surprise Lode blowing their pay on whores and whiskey, then disappearing back to the joint on the Sunday train. Into town drifts the very youthful Matthew Dubchek—a.k.a. the Ringo Kid, a.k.a. Matthew Bradford Chumms, et al.—a self-described compulsive liar given to aliases. Did he kill his parents back in Nebraska? Matthew soon manages to get himself a few odd jobs around town and sets himself up in the marshal’s abandoned office. Then crazy murderer Hamilton Lieder escapes from the state prison with two other equally crazy murderers and arrives in Twenty Mile to rob the train of its silver. Lieder is a strongly conceived patriot/villain who hopes to enlist the silver miners in his crusade against the International Conspiracy, the Yellow Peril, and the immigrants sucking out America’s lifeblood. Lieder and his men round up all the guns in town and await the train. Will Matthew, who appoints himself marshal, be able to match wits against the crazies? Will beautiful Ruth Lillian get to the mine and warn the miners of the thieves? Factually based and richly researched: one of the best Westerns since True Grit.
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-19233-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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