A hurricane, passing over southern Florida, leaves in its untidy wake the usual Hiaasen carnival of knaves and fools. Listen up now, because there's going to be a quiz on how the hurricane changes everybody's plans. Animal farmer Augustine Mojaki suddenly finds himself on the road hunting down a covey of escaped snakes, monkeys, rare birds, and the occasional water buffalo. Advertising exec Max Lamb, determined to spice up his honeymoon with bride Bonnie by videotaping the storm's devastation, falls into the clutches of Skink, a demented one-eyed kidnapper. Edie Marsh, who came to the Sunshine State planning to seduce and file rape charges against one of the younger male Kennedys, joins forces with a recent manslaughter alumnus to fake an insurable accident, but then lucks into smarmy trailer salesman Tony Torres's plot to scam his own insurer and, incidentally, his estranged wife. Tony is in turn urgently sought by professional goon Ira Jackson, bent on avenging the mother who died in one of the double-wides Tony guaranteed would withstand gale-force winds, and by Ira's trailer-park neighbor Levon Stichler, bereft not of his wife but of the urn containing her ashes. Jim Tile, the black highway patrolman sworn to protect Skink's anonymity—did we mention that the maniac kidnapper is also a former governor of Florida?—gets derailed when his intimate fellow officer Brenda Rourke is savagely beaten after a routine roadside pullover—as if anything routine ever happened in this riotously corrupt world. And don't worry about the cast members: When they wear out, Hiaasen just slips new ones into the deck. Here's the quiz, then: Is a new bride abandoned by her husband more likely to find happiness with a peripatetic zookeeper or the husband's kidnapper? Lacks the powerfully satiric center that gave Strip Tease (1993) such an edge, but sinfully madcap all the same. If you're not laughing by page six, you need a complete checkup.
Pub Date: Aug. 24, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41982-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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