Raucous, imaginative entertainment.
A robot doctor makes the rounds in this wacky medical fantasia.
Mount Sinai Hospital’s newest intern, Dr. Alan Rossum, is too good to be true–or at least human. He’s “fireproof, germ-retardant, buoyant, unstainable, extremely flexible and even shrink-resistant,” can diagnose most patients just by looking at them, and is already an expert in every specialty. His preternatural good looks and comforting bedside manner provoke all women to throw themselves at him, though his heart belongs to the elevator computer with the lilting loudspeaker. Best of all, in the eyes of the cost-conscious hospital management that bought him, he’s cheap, doesn’t mind odd hours and never goes on strike. But even when his leg is blown off and he must go hopping across the grounds to retrieve it, no one, aside from a ten-year-old boy in the psych ward, particularly notices that Rossum is an android. He hardly stands out at a place where the top surgeon is blind and dismembered corpses are spliced back together and reanimated. His presence does, however, arouse the wrath of the mysterious M.A.F.–either the Medical Anti-Defamation Foundation or the Mobsters Against Fysicians, according to a high-priced abbreviations consultant–a terrorist group that launches high-concept attacks on the hospital’s board. One director is permanently magnetized by an MRI machine while another is pushed into a giant photocopier and emerges with a compulsive urge to mimic everyone he encounters. Simmons, an internist and author of The Z-Papers (1976, etc.), orchestrates the hijinks with a healthy disregard for rhyme and reason. His surreal gags puts one in mind of Douglas Adams, had he written A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Medical Center. (A stint in Mount Sinai’s extraterrestrial’s ward makes for one of Dr. Rossum’s most hilarious adventures.) The result is a pixilated comedy that’s as light as a balloon filled with laughing-gas.
Raucous, imaginative entertainment.Pub Date: March 18, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-3053-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
