FullReviews Index - page 4
The Futurist
He makes a spectacular living traveling the globe and spouting prepackaged wisdom to the leaders of government and business, but a Dear John letter from his girlfriend and minibar's worth of alcohol send the futurist off track at a Johannesburg Futureworld Conference and onto a collision course with his own future. James Othmer walks a perfect line between a hilariously entertaining novel and a sharply sardonic commentary on the role of American Empire.
Adverbs
Adverbs is a novel about love -- a bunch of different people, in and out of different kinds of love. At the start of the novel, Andrea is in love with David -- or maybe it's Joe -- who instead falls in love with Peter in a taxi. At the end of the novel, it's Joe who's in the taxi, falling in love with Andrea, although it might not be Andrea, and in any case it might not be the same Andrea, as Andrea is a very common name...
The Man In My Basement
Walter Mosely, author of the Easy Rawlins detective novels, weaves a more philosophical story in The Man in My Basement. Charles Blakely is an unemployed African-American who rents his basement to a wealthy white man for a large amount of money. What ensues is an exploration of heavy themes: guilt and redemption, power and manipulation, and race.
Fortunate Son
Walter Mosley's novel about two boys, one ensconced in a life of privilege and the other in a life of hardship, explores the true meaning of fortune. In spite of remarkable differences, Eric and Tommy are as close as brothers. Eric, a Nordic Adonis, is graced by a seemingly endless supply of good fortune. Tommy is a lame black boy, cursed with health problems, yet he remains optimistic and strong. The two eventually confront a common enemy and, ultimately, save their lives.
This Book Will Save Your Life
Richard Novak is a modern-day Everyman, a middle-aged divorcé trading stocks out of his home. He has done such a good job getting his life under control that he needs no one—except his trainer, nutritionist, and housekeeper. He is functionally dead and doesn’t even notice until two incidents—an attack of intense pain that lands him in the emergency room, and the discovery of an expanding sinkhole outside his house—conspire to hurl him back into the world.
The Brief History of the Dead
The City is inhabited by the recently departed, who reside there only as long as they remain in the memories of the living. Among the current residents of this afterlife are Luka Sims, who prints the only newspaper in the City, with news from the other side; Coleman Kinzler, a vagrant who speaks the cautionary words of God; and Marion and Phillip Byrd, who find themselves falling in love again after decades of marriage.
The Good Life
On a September 2001 morning in New York, brightness falls horribly from the sky, and people worlds apart suddenly find themselves working side by side at the devastated site, feeling lost anywhere else, yet battered still by memory and regret, by fresh disappointment and unimaginable shock. What happens, or should happen, when life stops us in our tracks, or our own choices do? What if both secrets and secret needs, long guarded steadfastly, are finally revealed? What is the good life?
On Beauty
Zadie Smith made a literary splash as a twenty-five-year-old with her debut novel White Teeth. Five years and two novels later, Smith has all but solidified herself a spot among the modern literary canon as one of a handful of truly important young novelists at work today. Smith's latest is On Beauty, a modern twist on E. M. Forster's Howard's End, updated to the still-stiff-collared world of twenty-first-century ivy-league academia.
Utterly Monkey
Taking place over an intense five-day period - set in London and the fictional town of Ballyglass - Irish novelist Nick Laird's debut novel, Utterly Monkey, looks at who and what we really owe loyalty to: our lovers, our friends, our country, ourselves? And what happens to your soul in an office? And why do jellybeans cost so much in posh hotels?
The Accidental
Ali Smith's Booker-nominated novel, The Accidental, is in fact about a girl. The seemingly harmless stranger named Amber turns up at the door of an English country house and turns out, to crib a line from a Hollywood film, to be the rock that they broke themselves against. The book, about how people break down and the terrifying possibilities of who they might become, is inevitably fractured by the astonishing, dizzying talent of its writing.
A Long Way Down
Meet Martin, JJ, Jess, and Maureen. Four people who come together on New Year's Eve: a former TV talk show host, a musician, a teenage girl, and a mother. Three are British, one is American. They encounter one another on the roof of Topper's House, a London destination famous as the last stop for those ready to end their lives. In A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby mines the hearts and psyches of four lost souls who connect just when they've reached the end of the line.
The People of Paper
Amidst disillusioned saints hiding in wrestling rings, mothers burnt by glowing halos, and a Baby Nostradamus who sees only blackness, a gang of flower pickers heads off to war, led by a lonely man who cannot help but wet his bed in sadness. Part memoir, part lies, The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia is a book about the wounds inflicted by first love and sharp objects.
Lunar Park
Bret Easton Ellis's new novel, Lunar Park, is a feat of literary sleight-of-hand, a bait and switch game that finds Ellis addressing his controversial work and his relationship to it in a fictionalized confession. Its first spellbinding chapter relates the lurid story of Ellis's rise to stardom, exactly the sort of tell-all that readers have craved. Ellis blames his abusive, manipulative father for the bleak worldview that would inform his writing.
Indecision
Dwight Wilmerding, the narrator of Benjamin Kunkel's comic novel, Indecision, is encouraged by one of his roommates to try an experimental pharmaceutical meant to banish indecision. And when all at once he is "pfired" from Pfizer and invited to a rendezvous in exotic Ecuador with the girl of his long-ago prep-school dreams, he finds himself on the brink of a new life.
The Confessions of Max Tivoli
We are each the love of someone's life. So begins "The Confessions of Max Tivoli," a heartbreaking love story with a narrator like no other. At his birth, Max's father declares him a "nisse," a creature of Danish myth, as his baby son has the external physical appearance of an old, dying creature. Max grows older like any child, but his physical age appears to go backward--on the outside a very old man, but inside still a fearful child.
Little Children
The characters of Tom Perrotta's latest novel, Little Children, are a surprising bunch: Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad; Sarah, a lapsed feminist with a bisexual past; Richard, Sarah's husband, who has found himself more and more involved with a fantasy life on the internet; and Mary Ann, who thinks she has it all figured out. Written with all the fluency of Perrotta's previous novels, Little Children exposes adult dramas amidst the swingsets and slides of an ordinary American playground.
St. Dale
From Sharyn McCrumb, comes a vibrant, wholly original novel of love, faith, and miracles, as only she can tell it. A NASCAR trip called the Dale Earnhardt Memorial Pilgrimage — that's just about the last thing Judge Bekasu Holifield would have chosen for her vacation. But this year it's her sister Justine's turn to make their plans. Before she knows it, she's boarding a silver cruise bus for a tour of Southern speedways with Justine, their cousin Cayle, and a group of strangers.
Colors Insulting to Nature
In "Colors Insulting to Nature," Cintra Wilson has fused a hilarious yet strangely touching coming-of-age story with a blistering satire of our celebrity-debased culture. In a world where actors become presidents and plucky American Idols claw their way to stardom over the corpses of the dreams of a million wishful losers, Colors Insulting to Nature shocks us into seeing ourselves as we truly are, not as we think we look when we make that French pout face in the mirror.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Oskar Schell, the precocious nine year old narrator from Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, is an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Everything is Illuminated
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man - also named Jonathan Safran Foer - sets out to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.
Liberating Paris
Liberating Paris by Linda Bloodworth Thomason deserves to be ranked among those Southern writers who have established a sense of place and character. The themes of friendship, redemption, and grace under pressure are examined in the context of Paris, Arkansas. Six childhood friends have just turned forty, their lives turned upside down. As Thomason says, "There is a death, a birth, and a wedding" which split the town yet bring the central characters together in new, stronger ways...
The Sea of Tears
"This is all about love," begins The Sea of Tears. Infused with the sensuality and smarts that have established Nani Power, this otherworldly novel delves into the tangled relationships and hidden worlds of people brought together-and torn apart-under extraordinary circumstances. Harking back to the ancient tales of The Arabian Nights but with a decidedly modern eye towards the clashing and mingling of cultures, this is Power's most ambitious work to date.
I Am Charlotte Simmons
"Dupont University - the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition... Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a wide-eyed, bookish freshman from a strict, devout, poor and poorly educated family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. But Charlotte soon learns... that for the uppercrust coeds of Dupont, sex, Cool, and kegs trump her towering academic achievement every time."
The Christmas Train
Tom Langdon, a weary and cash-strapped journalist, is banned from flying when a particularly thorough airport security search causes him to lose his cool. Now, he must take the train if he has any chance of arriving in Los Angeles in time for Christmas. To finance the trip, he sells a story about a train ride taken during the Christmas season. Along the way, Tom encounters a ridiculous cast of characters, unexpected romance, and an avalanche that changes everyone's Christmas plans.
The Memory of Running
Meet Smithson “Smithy” Ide, an overweight, friendless, chain-smoking, forty-three-year-old drunk who works as a quality control inspector at a toy action-figure factory in Rhode Island. By all accounts, including Smithy's own, he's a loser. But when Smithy's life of quiet desperation is brutally interrupted by tragedy, he stumbles across his old Raleigh bicycle and impulsively sets off on an epic journey that might give him one last chance to become the person he always wanted to be.