Looks beneath a famous stunt’s sensationalism to discover its roots in tragedy and need.
Based on historical events, this novel tells the story of Annie Edson Taylor, who, in 1901, became the first person to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
Schoolteacher Annie Edson Taylor, a widow, is traveling back East when robbers board her train and steal her life’s savings. Desperate, Annie listens when carnies in her boardinghouse suggest she perform “a stunt no one has ever survived” and make money telling her story, perhaps at the upcoming Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. The location suggests Niagara Falls, so Annie uses her mathematical and engineering know-how to calculate the best odds for going over. She commissions a barrel with the right characteristics, gets a talent agent to represent her, and dyes her graying hair daredevil red. But it’s not that simple, as Annie discovers when she gets to Niagara and becomes a pawn of shady businessmen hoping to cash in on her stunt, offering “protection” in return. Annie makes a deal with Mr. Stilwell, an experienced riverman, who shows her how to avoid the whirlpool and takes her on a tour. They share an attraction to each other and the falls. But after her famous stunt, Annie must leave Niagara to make a living. Will he follow when the falls “are his oxygen and without them he will smother”? In her debut novel, playwright Morin ably portrays the cruelty that’s allied with hucksterism, from unfortunate animals sent over the falls to onlookers’ hopes of observing tragedy. Annie’s careful preparations for her stunt—designing the barrel, scouting the location—make engrossing reading. Several first-person, present-tense points of view, including those of a tough bodyguard and a ghost, contribute to the story’s immediacy and drama, but the voices are very similar and sometimes implausibly lyrical. “The deaths of the sad and the foolish keep the local tramps in hard liquor and old flowers,” muses Stilwell, so rough around the edges that he lives in a cave.
Looks beneath a famous stunt’s sensationalism to discover its roots in tragedy and need.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-948133-01-2
Page Count: 285
Publisher: Po84 Productions
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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