Glib trash, and a rather sad middle-aged male fantasy of a younger woman’s desire for an older man.
A crude attempt at romance from Adler (The Ties That Bind, 1994, etc.), this time about a Catholic divorcée on the skids who ensnares and then falls in love with a rich Jewish widower.
Thirty-eight-year-old Grace can barely support herself and troubled sixteen-year-old daughter Jackie working at the makeup counter of the Saks Fifth Avenue in Palm Beach, Florida. When Grace gets fired, the executive doing the firing coolly suggests she look for a rich, aging husband instead of a new job—a Jewish widower, the ex-boss suggests, because Jewish men make good husbands. At first Grace is outraged, but she needs money and finds herself attending Jewish funerals. She sets her sights on Sam, a business magnate whose wife has died of cancer. In his early 60s, Sam is fit, good-looking, and well-heeled. Grace insinuates herself into his life by pretending to have done charity work with his wife, and he accepts her offer to give away the dead woman’s extensive wardrobe. Soon she is at the house daily, sorting designer labels, sipping champagne with Sam, and having the best sex of her life. While charming him with her apparent honesty, Grace is increasingly guilt-stricken about the web of lies she's spun about her past. She doesn’t know that Sam is also hiding a guilty secret: his beloved wife’s frigidity sent him to prostitutes. Then Grace discovers that his wife secretly had a lover. As Grace falls in love with her Jewish “mark,” she tries to give moral guidance to Jackie, now under the spell of a vicious, anti-Semitic skinhead. Can Sam, a kind and caring person as well as a fabulous lover, save not only Grace but her daughter from evil? Will he still love Grace even after all secrets are exposed?
Glib trash, and a rather sad middle-aged male fantasy of a younger woman’s desire for an older man.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2001
ISBN: 1-57566-898-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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