Recovering alcoholic Charley Sloan (Shadow of a Doubt, 1991, etc.), lowest rung of the Detroit bar, juggles three juicy cases as he struggles to keep from falling off the wagon. Charley's just lost the first case—his defense of alleged euthanasiast Miles Stewart (``Doctor Death'')—but the presiding judge allowed so much inadmissible evidence that Charley's confident of winning the appeal. In the meantime, however, the charmless doctor keeps making trips out of town, one of which ends with an elderly, ailing corpse and a $200,000 contribution to his research foundation. After Charley ruthlessly presses for an out-of-court settlement to the second case—former prostitute Becky Harris's rape/assault suit against her sometime boyfriend, car salesman Howard Wordley—Becky decides to kiss and make up with Wordley, leaving Charley way out on a limb with the folks he's been intimidating. But it's the third case that's the killer. Arguing the appeal of a product liability suit—a mobile home mysteriously accelerated on its own, leaving driver Will McHugh hopelessly crippled, and seedy, conscientious attorney-of- record Mickey Monk on the verge of bankruptcy—Charley gets a series of deafening hints from sleazy former judge Jeffrey Mallow that the appeal will go in his client's favor if only he's willing to slip a substantial bribe to Judge William Palmer, the revered law-school mentor who had kept Charley from disbarment a few years back. Unwilling to finger Palmer (whose insistent daughter he's just started to date) and unable to back out of the case (Palmer and Mallow have threatened to discredit him if he doesn't come across), Charley's in a three-ring pickle. It's a pleasure watching the well-oiled machinery—politics, threats, and shameless legal maneuvering—that eventually brings Charley to a perfect three-point landing.
Pub Date: Oct. 7, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-017701-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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