Anyone who still believes that visitors from outer space are little wrinkled green men with weaving antennae are in for some surprises in this novel by Hemingway (niece of Ernest) and her husband, Lindsay. Billed as a fictional account of an alleged governmental cover-up of a UFO that crash-landed in the Nevada desert nearly 50 years ago, Dreamland spins a high-tech, often far-fetched fantasy of space travelers experimenting with hybrid life forms and revealing themselves to humans via cattle mutilations, eerie music, and bright lights on deserted roads. The bad guys here are US intelligence cadres of Black Berets operating from a top-secret Air Force base and led by veteran Cold Warrior Colonel John Wesley. Wesley shows his style early in the novel by murdering a National Security Agency operative for daring to suggest limits on his ``hostile approach'' to the government's extraterrestrial guests. Meanwhile, heroine astronomer Annie Katz, four months pregnant by her husband, Stanley, in Los Alamos, N.M., mysteriously loses her gestating baby (no miscarriage, it just disappears). In her grief, Annie begins having strange visions of an owl that had nearly smashed into her car's windshield one night, unaware it is a fake memory of her fetus being abducted by aliens. The truth comes out when Katz is hypnotized by UFO investigator Frank Cassidy, summoned to her home by Jungian psychiatrist Carol Blum who says things like ``What happened to you has a psychological classification. It's called Post-Abduction Syndrome.'' Such insights are dangerous, and it isn't long before the Black Berets destroy Blum, Cassidy, and several cops. The Katzes escape, with Annie later evaporating hit squads with a lethal particle-beam weapon called JOSHUA. A little grayish being with four fingers returns the fetus to her uterus. Obviously a far cry from Papa Hemingway's realism, Dreamland is spotty SF that takes an occasional, if unintentional, satirical swipe at space-age angst. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85631-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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