An uneven financial tale that attempts to merge the commercial and the spiritual.
In this tale of corporate skullduggery and mystical awakening, a multibillionaire decides to radically alter his course and seek a clearer path to happiness.
Nick Dalca inherited $1 billion from his father, Ilie, who died young after building a successful corporation from the wreckage left to him by his own profligate dad, Emilian. Nick’s grandfather, a Rumanian immigrant, has died but his regretful spirit lingers, relaying messages to two mother-daughter psychics who are able to comprehend him. Fortuitously, the younger medium is Nick’s longtime, stalwart secretary, Anne Drake. Nick is the sole controller of the Dalca Group of 35 corporations and hundreds of subsidiaries. He is a very wealthy man. But recently he has lost interest is running his businesses, even in making money. He suffered a terrible loss two years earlier when the private plane carrying his wife and son to a vacation spot in France apparently crashed but was never recovered. With some spiritual guidance from Anne, and his own initiative, Nick decides to covertly sell his entire corporate holdings in one package. Those conducting the transaction are elated at the news because, with the typical hyperbolic flourish employed by the author, “it was the largest deal in the history of private business.” An agreement is struck with a foreign bank for “$180 billion…Cash.” The negotiation`s, handled in a remarkably jejeune manner in the book’s weakest sections, are done secretly to avoid notice by some trying to sabotage the arrangement. More effective are Davidsohn’s (Mare Crisium, 2015, etc.) descriptions of travels through France, Norway, and Germany. The scenery, food, and wine, coupled with a burgeoning love affair,create an appealing sense of joy. Also well expressed are the author’s anti-business rants. Nick: “The truth is, I don’t know one single buddy of mine who wakes up in the morning, rubs his palms, and says I’m going to create jobs today. We don’t care, Anne....what we want is more money, more power.”
An uneven financial tale that attempts to merge the commercial and the spiritual.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-8-59-089857-3
Page Count: 276
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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