A clunky affair hobbled by stilted dialogue and Albom-grade sentimentality.
A one-time golf wunderkind gets his groove back in this would-be inspirational tale.
Though Mott’s debut is set amid greens and fairways, it plays out a lot like a dusty Western. Its hero, Charlie MacLeod, is a restless drifter who blows into town, arriving at a San Francisco–area course with little more than the clothes on his back and a willingness to take pick-up work as a caddy. Recently divorced, he has a checkered past and carries battle scars (his promising golf career as a teen was cut short after an arm injury). And he’s got something to fight for: Once he discovers that his arm has healed well enough that he can start competing again, he’s pitted against a big-money golfer in a climactic duel, while the only woman who understands him (the woman working the night desk at a motel) cheers him on. Sports easily lend themselves to parable-like redemption stories such as these, but Mott’s execution often borders on the inept. He clearly knows the culture of the caddy shack, which is populated with tough-talking carousers, but he does little to differentiate one from another, leading to long and maddeningly static passages of platitude-stuffed chatter. Charlie’s backstory is almost laughably untenable—he practically grew up on the golf course, pushed hard by a father who lived only to work at a Pittsburgh steel mill and dispense advice about putts and drives. And though Charlie occupies nearly every page, he rarely becomes more than a cardboard character cut-out with a hackneyed, third-reel-of-a-tearjerker humility. (“I lost everything. But I found some others.”) Mott injects a bit of tension into the closing chapters, but by then, Charlie has become so thoroughly Christ-like that it’s not hard to place a good bet on the ending.
A clunky affair hobbled by stilted dialogue and Albom-grade sentimentality.Pub Date: March 29, 2007
ISBN: 0-307-26536-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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
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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