For all the camp and melodrama, a finely detailed and satisfyingly complicated mystery, aided in its allure by several...
Skillfully blending facts, fancy, and a vision of the earliest days of moviemaking, the artful Mann (Wisecracker, 1998, etc.) resurrects the first movie star as a hot-ticket 107-year-old discovered in a Catholic nursing home in Buffalo by twin brothers who promptly start fighting over her to further their own agendas.
In reality, Florence Lawrence was the Biograph Girl, cinema’s brightest star, by 1910, and a suicide by 1938. Here, she’s a sharp-witted, caftan-clothed, chain-smoking centenarian named Flo, stumbled upon by freelance journalist Richard Sheehan when the man he was supposed to interview in the home turns out to have just died. Captivated by her, Richard wants her story, but the first tantalizing clues that she’s the Biograph Girl run up against the seemingly insurmountable fact of her having committed suicide. While Richard’s sleuthing eventually gets the LAPD involved, with the result that the body in Florence Lawrence’s Hollywood grave is exhumed, his idealistic documentary filmmaker brother Ben also takes an interest in Flo, spurred on by the sympathetic nun in charge of the home, who sees in Ben’s eyes the eyes of her former lover. Ben’s high-powered agent catches wind of Flo’s mysterious and glamorous past, along with the scandal surrounding her at present, and suddenly Ben is having a script greenlighted by Hollywood’s biggest mogul—on the condition that he can tease the truth from the reluctant Flo and turn it into docudrama. Will Ben sell out? Will Richard save Flo from his brother? Will forcing Flo to confront the shadows in her past be the end of her?
For all the camp and melodrama, a finely detailed and satisfyingly complicated mystery, aided in its allure by several characters simultaneously coming to terms with how they came to be who they are.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57566-559-X
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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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