A scattershot story, but one that manages to deliver a historically edifying depiction of the 1960s.
A debut tale of organized crime, political unrest, and love in New York City during the 1960s.
A sophisticated, four-man criminal fraternity, the Chimera Group, also known as “the Rude Boys,” has risen to prominence in Manhattan. One night, a man brutally assaults one of group’s members, John, and Celia Jones, who works at a local nightclub, saves his life. John soon falls in love with her, and she initially responds to his romantic overtures. However, their prospects seem doomed by the fact that he’s already in a loveless marriage. Celia eventually comes to work for the Rude Boys as their bookkeeper and begins a relationship with Ben, the group’s “number three man,” further complicating her relationship with John. She soon learns that the Chimera Group is hemorrhaging cash, due to another partner’s ungovernable drug habit. Meanwhile, the group contends with the unwanted attention of the Italian mob, which views the diverse group with racist disdain. Bolton aptly captures the tempestuous spirit of the time—a volatile brew of political radicalism, crime, racial tension, and sexual libertinism—and her painstaking historical research is evident on virtually every page. However, the prose is consistently plodding and the dialogue leaden, as when Celia aggressively flirts with John: “ ‘If you do dream of me, remember, I like it rough,’ she said as she sashayed to the door….John stood there and stared at her, feeling an intoxicating tactile euphoria in his whole body.” Other than the atmosphere of the decade, there’s little that binds together the meandering plot, which reads more like a successive series of random happenings than a coherent whole. One can’t help but wonder whether Bolton’s formidable command of the setting would have been better employed in a nonfiction work.
A scattershot story, but one that manages to deliver a historically edifying depiction of the 1960s.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5187-5433-3
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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