Bummer.
A dispirited academic discovers a drug that lets him relive better days.
Win Duncan is a 40-year-old professor, unpublished and therefore about to perish on the tenure track. He is stalled in the middle of his book project, which was meant to establish Thomas De Quincy, author of the infamous Confessions of an English Opium Eater, as the father of modern pharmacology. Win’s wife, Edie, by contrast, has just made another academic star turn and is certain to land a permanent position at the small New England college where they both teach. Win can’t remember the last time they made love, and his successful ad exec father’s entreaties for Win to return to New York and earn some big bucks working for him further depletes Win’s self-esteem. So it is with much more than mere curiosity that Win decides to act on an out-of-the-blue request from a long-lost grad-school friend, Phil Litminov, who parachutes back into Win’s life with a late-night phone call asking him to help beta-test a potential blockbuster new drug Litminov is developing, called Mem. Litminov’s little pill transports users to any point in their past. The hyper-reality of re-experience as engendered by Mem is more intoxicating than opium. Taking Mem, Win remembers with molecular accuracy his better, brighter self, and before he knows it, he’s lying to his wife, blowing off his classes, abusing the trust of his best friend and otherwise ruining his present life. He’ll do anything to get back to Litminov’s strange, tumble-down Connecticut mansion that serves as his “laboratory,” where he takes guided Mem tours back in time. Kennedy (Black Livingstone, 2002, etc.), who often writes about those on the edges of society in both fiction and nonfiction formats, has a quirky, compelling idea along the lines of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. When the drug wears off, however, what’s left is a typical immature-academic coming-of-age story.
Bummer.Pub Date: July 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-9728984-8-4
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Leapfrog
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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