An exciting, enticing first entry in a planned series.
A historical fantasy starring a visitor from the 22nd century and Abraham Lincoln.
On a crowded train in 1849, a most anachronistic meeting takes place between the future 16th president of the United States and a curious looking man from Baltimore circa 2163 A.D.; Edwin Blair offers Lincoln a cash gift, makes an appointment with the future commander in chief for 14 years later and, in a flash, transports himself to 1863 Washington where he marches to the White House and calls in his favor. Blair hails from an apocalyptic future brought about by an alien invasion and his mission is to convince Lincoln and a select few members of his cabinet to use the inevitable confrontation at Gettysburg as cover for annihilating this race of extraterrestrials before they grow too strong. Why not pick a time with nuclear warheads instead of Griffen guns, and supercarriers instead of ironclads? Because that wouldn’t be any fun. More technically, Blair explains that if you assault the alien vessels with modern weaponry, they explode and the radius of devastation stretches for miles. But, really, it’s a happily contrived excuse for a witty, ludicrous, knowing and engaging science-fiction/historical novel. There’s something deliciously self-conscious in Pielke’s thoughtfully rendered character study of the Great Emancipator being weaved into the broader scenes of a 22nd-century historian holding forth on time travel and aliens while attempting to convince Lincoln, and by extension the reader, of the novel’s tongue-in-cheek premise. In the prose and loving period detail, the novel has charm in abundance. The smells of 19th-century America are a surprising and convincing detail as Blair plods along the streets and fields of ancient America, and he is constantly attempting to adjust his lexical choices to the period, with amusingly overwrought results. Pielke manages all this with great admiration for the period and its language. But Civil War buffs beware—it’s all in good fun and it’s only possible to be so deferential when aliens are tossed onto such hallowed historical ground.
An exciting, enticing first entry in a planned series.Pub Date: May 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-1936021239
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Altered Dimensions
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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