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RANDOM WALK

Name: RANDOM WALK
Author: Lawrence Block
ISBN: 1583483810

by Lawrence Block ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 17, 1988

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In his foreword to this "Novel for a New Age," as the publisher touts it, mystery maven Block (the Matt Scudder and Evan Tanner series, etc.) thanks 15 spiritual teachers for their "valuable assistance." Too bad none of these gums had the smarts to tell Block to shelve this naive, preachy, and dull offering about a ragtag band of pilgrims who achieve ersatz wisdom on their walk to nowhere. The first walker is Oregon bartender Guthrie Wagner, who one day hears a voice in his head say, "You could take a walk." Take a walk Guthrie does, quitting his job and stepping east. Right away, small miracles occur: he sleeps in near-freezing air and feels no chill; he gives up smoking without trying. Meanwhile, two others soon to cross paths with Guthrie go about their business: 30-ish Indiana mom Sara Duskin, losing her sight but gaining insight and vision; and serial killer Mark Adlon, a woman-hating, millionaire real-estate investor whose stalking and slaying of a slew of victims provides the only real suspense here. As Mark goes on a cross-country killing spree, Sara ups stakes and, young son in tow, follows her heart to Guthrie, who's now strolling along with a buddy he's picked up along the way. The quartet ambles on, joined by dozens, then scores of others who feel the irresistible pull to walk; miracle cures of cancer and paralysis balloon among the walkers as Sara, now the band's acknowledged gum, goes into a trance and reveals their purpose: "to cure the planet's cancer. . .when enough people are walking, the planetary consciousness will reach critical mass, and then everybody will just plain get it without walking." Even serial killers, it seems: when Mark finally feels the call and finds the walkers, they forgive him his murders—after all, as Sara tells him, "Is it your fault they're dead? No. Every death is a kind of suicide; the one who dies chooses it." Fair warning: Run, don't walk, away from this dull psychospiritual babble.

Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1988

ISBN: 1583483810

Page Count: 300

Publisher: Tor

Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1988

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
INTO THE NIGHT
by Cornell Woolrich & Lawrence Block

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BURGLAR IN SHORT ORDER
by Lawrence Block

- BOOK REVIEW
IN SUNLIGHT OR IN SHADOW
edited by Lawrence Block

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.

After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).