New York Daily News columnist Lupica, acclaimed as a sportswriter, remains a step slow as a novelist (Jump, 1995, etc.) Some...
Pro-football as viewed from the superboxes—entirely raunchy, fitfully funny.
Suddenly, Jack Molloy owns an NFL team. Now a lot of people would like that. Some would kill for it, in fact. But Jack isn’t one of them. To begin with, he’s happy where he is—in Las Vegas, working for Billy Grace, a big-time gambler and casino owner. Jack is Billy’s “Jammer,” meaning he’s the go-to guy whenever there’s a jam involving a particularly valued client (read: high roller). But Jack’s discomfort on learning that the New York Hawks belongs to him goes beyond the need to uproot. It goes to the heart of his loving but complex relationship with his father. They quarreled five years ago. They haven’t spoken since. And now Big Tim is dead of a heart attack, his team left not to Jack’s sycophantic siblings Ken and Babs, but, unexpectedly, to himself: an extremely prodigal son who’d gone on record disclaiming any interest. While still dubious about this unlooked-for legacy, Jack becomes the center of a blistering firestorm. Temporarily at least, everyone hates him—Ken and Babs, his headline-hungry head coach, the majority of Hawk players, the sexy female president of the organization, and, most annoyingly, that assortment of rapacious billionaires who would do just about anything to lift the burden of Jack’s franchise from him. It’s this last that steels his will. Metaphorically, then, it becomes fourth and inches, seconds left on the clock, and the Lombardi Trophy within view and glittering. Time to bump and run for it.
New York Daily News columnist Lupica, acclaimed as a sportswriter, remains a step slow as a novelist (Jump, 1995, etc.) Some savvy inside stuff, but the comedy is strained, the characters either flat or derivative, and you really have to love the game to stay four quarters.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-14647-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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