by Joshua Cohen ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 2017
For a writer whose last two novels total some 1,400 pages, Cohen has slimmed down here but still covers a lot of territory.
A New York City moving company gets into trouble when it starts doing evictions in a wide-ranging novel that touches on political, religious, and social issues.
David King’s father survived Buchenwald to open a U.S. furniture-moving business that his son has expanded while ruining his marriage via sex with his manager. As the book opens in 2015, David is divorced, has new teeth and hair plugs, and is awkwardly, comically schmoozing among WASPs at a political fundraiser in the Hamptons. He manages to connect with real estate mogul Fraunces Bower III, a link that will resonate in the novel’s climax. David’s Uncle Shoyl survived Auschwitz, and Shoyl’s grandson, Yoav, joins King’s Moving after compulsory service in the Israeli army. His squad-mate Uri is having a hard time adjusting to civilian life, and he also eventually flies to New York to work for the moving company. All these elements will come together when a Vietnam War veteran named Avery Luter/Imamu Nabi misses too many mortgage payments on the home he inherited from his mother and stages a mini-Occupation as the King moving company receives its first job from the Bower real estate empire—evicting Luter. Cohen (The Book of Numbers, 2015, etc.) shows an impressive knowledge of life in the cab of a moving van and in the ranks of the Israeli Defense Forces. He touches on two wars and two combat zones (counting brief allusions to Afghanistan). He is funny and caustic and has a marvelous snap in his dialogue.
For a writer whose last two novels total some 1,400 pages, Cohen has slimmed down here but still covers a lot of territory.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-59018-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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by Lee Yaron with Joshua Cohen
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by Elias Canetti ; edited by Joshua Cohen
by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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