Brilliantly crafted and pitched perfectly, which we expect from this author; but also challenging and deliberately...
Bestselling Goodman (Kaaterskill Falls, 1998, etc.) takes a bold step forward with this comic novel about a very serious spiritual quest undertaken by a narrator who’s as often obnoxious as endearing.
We meet Sharon Spiegelman in the mid-1970s, in Hawaii, where she and boyfriend Gary have migrated from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to save the Pacific's endangered species. But now he’s taken off, leaving Sharon with a hotel bill she can’t pay and “all these questions and ideas about this higher power.” Over the next 19 years, mostly in Hawaii, Sharon pursues enlightenment in various forms, from joining a Pentecostal church to majoring in religion at the local university, until, about halfway through the story, she begins a slow journey back to the Judaism of her ancestors. None of this stops her from loving unsuitable men or from observing, with an exceedingly sharp eye, those purporting to dish out religious truth. (Of her control-freak Buddhist mentor: “How could you devote your whole life to contemplation . . . and still be such an asshole?”) Sharon is equally aware of her own “fickle soul”; even in her most serious engagement, with the Bialystoker Hasid sect, she’s unable to reconcile the mysticism she loves with regulations that are inimical to her free spirit. Or is she just lazy and undisciplined? For every astute remark, Sharon utters two pieces of post-hippie psychobabble; she’s an admitted liar and (former) drug dealer; and her shamelessly manipulative letters to her estranged father and an unsympathetic professor would be revolting if they weren’t so laughably ineffective. In short, Sharon is a wonderfully complex, utterly believable character, and Goodman softens none of her unattractive qualities. Yet she’s also truly, passionately seeking God, and she comes to a form of traditional-yet-customized Judaism that seems just right for her.
Brilliantly crafted and pitched perfectly, which we expect from this author; but also challenging and deliberately uningratiating, which we might not.Pub Date: March 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-33416-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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
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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