Serious, important political history narrated by Dame Barbara Cartland.
The honey-voiced prophet of the conservative revival (Spytime, 2000, etc.) runs his hands fondly and semifictionally through the mementos of the past half-century.
Those were the days, weren’t they? When it looked as though the New Dealers and their offspring had a death grip on the machinery of government. When the Rockefeller wing and the Eisenhower wing and the Scranton wing soared in collaborationist triumph with their Democratic birds of a feather on the thermals drifting up over the so-so-misguided capital. And everyone thought that was normal and desirable! When the fate of the great land rested in the hands of microscopic groups of right thinkers. When Ayn Rand was alive and still objectifying. When Robert Welch was just beginning to turn his attention from the family candy works to the invention of the John Birch Society. When the Young Americans for Freedom were driving on learners’ permits. What a great task lay ahead of those visionaries! Even in their wildest dreams could they have envisioned, say, Fox News? Perhaps only Miss Rand had had that kind of vision. She certainly looms large in this sentimental bit of fiction built on the framework of real-life rise of the Right. Woodroe Raynor is the trusty young Mormon on whom Buckley hangs his triumphal tale. During his missionary year in postwar Austria, young Woodroe discovers the evils of communism and the wonders of sex in one night across the last footbridge leading to Hungary. Looking for further education in both fields, the lad stumbles into the 1956 revolution, barely making it back to the West, taking a bullet in the thigh and a dagger in the heart when he discovers his girlfriend is in bed with the commies. Limping back to Princeton, Raynor goes on to become a pioneer staffer at the new John Birch Society, just misses another bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald, falls in love with one of Ayn Rand’s handmaidens, gets to know just about everyone who mattered on the Right, and finally comes around to the blue-blooded, temperate wisdom of the National Review.
Serious, important political history narrated by Dame Barbara Cartland.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-89526-138-3
Page Count: 344
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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