Greenwich Village Gazette: Entertainment: Book Reviews

From Publisher's Weekly
In the massive conclusion to his elaborate metaphysical trilogy, Hamilton (The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist) resolves the fate of humanity and its confrontation with the souls of its dead. In this volume, the Confederation's epic spiritual crisis reaches a climax: the tear in the boundary between reality and afterlife, a boundary that many souls cross to possess the bodies of the living and to use their energistic power, remains open. Petrified of being forced back into the beyond--a hell where all souls anguish in nothingness but can see the familiar universe just out of reach--the possessed withdraw entire planets from our universe to another. Two factions of the possessed, however, have no intention of leaving our universe: Al Capone's brutal, ever-expanding mafia organization and Quinn Dexter's cult of pain, which is trying to orchestrate a torturous apocalypse. Meanwhile, a Liberation Army attempts to forcefully remove individual possessors from their living victims, resulting in atrocities. GovCentral works on a weapon to extinguish a soul entirely from all existence, but is unwilling to commit itself to the kind of genocide the weapon would unleash. As a last hope, two starships are sent to hunt down a literal deus ex machina, another species's Sleeping God. Its existence is the only real hope that mankind has of surviving. Hamilton's work encompasses a broad sweep of philosophical and moralistic themes, yet he keeps a tight focus on his 100-plus "principal characters" and the highly fantastical universe they inhabit. His work requires slow, careful reading, but those who put in the extra effort will be paid back in full and then some. The depth and clarity of the future Hamilton envisions is as complex and involving as they come. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Since its paperback publication in May 1997, Rebecca Wells's
DIVINE SECRETS OF THE YA-YA SISTERHOOD
(the follow-up to her award-winning debut,
LITTLE ALTARS EVERYWHERE)
has acquired a devoted, perhaps fanatic, following.

Capacity crowds flock to her appearances at booksignings across the country, and local chapters of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood regularly greet her with gifts of "branch water" and scrapbooks of their own Ya-Ya initiation ceremonies. Some serious Ya-Ya-ficcionados have immersed themselves so thoroughly in their obsession that the line between fiction and reality is beginning to blur: Wells cites a recent appearance in Knoxville, Tennessee, where "a gold GTO convertible roared up to the curb, filled to the brim with 10 wild women -- members of the 'Knoxville chapter of Ya-Yas!' They all wore Ya-Ya tee-shirts and were screaming and yelling, and before I knew it, they had swept me into the convertible with them. There I sat, homecoming queen-style, hooting with these women while a photographer from the Knoxville News Sentinel snapped photos!" But don't get the idea, as some reviewers have suggested, that DIVINE SECRETS is just "a woman's book;" As Wells herself says, "it's a book for women -- and smart men."

Wells's literate, yet earthy story runs a virtuostic tessitura of emotions, from poignantly sad low-notes to thrilling, redemptory highs. Her characters embody a hard-won wisdom that is never condescending, and a love that always offers the possibility of reconciliation. Little wonder then, that bookclubs across the country have embraced this story of a close-knit society of southern women. Well's genius is in portraying the universal in the particular. For me, the Ya-Ya's instantly conjure up adolescent memories of Virginia, images of unseasonably bronzed FFV ladies out for an afternoon's shopping, helmet-haired, tennis togged, enveloped in a fog of Chanel, Estee Lauder, Phillip Morris, and just a hint of the generous luncheon cocktail. But even readers denied the peculiar advantages of a southern upbringing will find in the troubled, but loving, mother-daughter relationship between Vivi and Siddalee Walker, and in the exploits of the inimitable Ya-Yas, a mirror-perfect reflection of their own life experiences.

The novel opens in New York City, where Siddalee Walker's Lincoln Center directorial triumph has caught the attention of The New York Times drama critic. While candidly discussing the long road to her overnight success, Sidda casually tosses off shocking reminiscences of her Louisiana childhood -- all but daring the interviewer to reveal her confessions. Even in a cultural backwater like Thornton, Louisiana, a certain class of folks is apt to read the Sunday Times Arts & Leisure section, and when Vivi Abbott Walker sees herself described as a "tap dancing child abuser," the fatwa she declares against her daughter sends shockwaves all the way to Manhattan.

Despite her calculated carelessness, Sidda is unprepared for the ruthlessness of her mother's fury. In quick order Sidda learns that Vivi has cut her out of her will, removed all photographs of her from her walls, tried to coerce her son, Baylor, to sue Sidda for libel, and forbidden the Ya-Ya's to speak to her. Eccentric and inseparable, the Ya-Yas -- Vivi, Teensy, Necie, and Caro -- have shared every aspect of each other's lives from school to marriage to motherhood; All of their Petites Ya-Yas have grown up with not one, but four mothers. To be excommunicated from this church of women is worst punishment Vivi can mete out to her 40-year-old daughter.

Convinced that she doesn't "know how to love," Sidda postpones her upcoming wedding to friend, lover, and all-around paragon of manhood, Connor McGill, and flees to a remote cabin in Washington state to sort herself out. This distress signal in turn starts Vivi's "mama radar" beeping 2,500 miles away and requires that she convene an emergency Ya-Ya war council to determine how best to help Sidda and, incidentally, further "the cause of legitimate theater." Though she offers neither explanations nor apologies ("Those days there was no Oprah," she says matter-of-factly), Vivi at last decides to reveal her jealously guarded past through the loan of her treasured scrapbook, the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.

As Sidda ponders the enormity of her mother's gesture and strives to solve the scrapbook's tantalizing jigsaw, each item of Ya-Ya-rabilia reveals a chapter of Ya-Ya history to the reader. We see the hilarious Shirley Temple Look-Alike Contest that first unites the Ya-Yas in a conspiracy against polite society, learn the Secret History of the Louisiana Ya-Yas and take part in their secret initiation rites, read Vivi's letters of a trip to Atlanta to attend the premier of "Gone With The Wind," meet Vivi's first and greatest love, lost in WWII, and experience first-hand the smothering constraints of motherhood and the long descent into alcoholism, self-medication, and spiritual confusion that lead to Vivi's complete nervous breakdown -- an event so traumatic that she can only refer to it as the day "I dropped my basket and could not pick it up." But the greatest of the unsuspected mysteries contained in the Divine Secrets is a key that unlocks Sidda's childhood memory of a lost lesson of love and brings her to a new understanding of her family's shared triumphs and tragedies.

With passion, humor, and an irrepressible gift for language (the Ya-Ya lexicon is truly a marvel), Rebecca Wells has brought her stories to life in the hearts and minds of an ever-growing group of readers. And with more than 200,000 copies of her books in print, it seems certain that the Ya-Ya phenomenon is only beginning. There is a prescient moment in LITTLE ALTARS EVERYWHERE where Vivi muses, "I wish I could have more times like this to tell about. I'd give them to my children, gift-wrap them myself to put in front of their eyes." DIVINE SECRETS OF A YA-YA SISTERHOOD is the fulfillment of that wish for us all.

CERTAIN PREY by John Sandford

In Certain Prey, Davenport confronts an entirely new kind of adversary. Clara Rinker is a southerner, trim, pleasant, attractive - and the best hit woman in the business. She isn't showy, not one of those movie killers; she just goes quietly about her business, collects her money, and goes home. It's when she's hired for a job in Minnesota that things become complicated for her. A defense attorney wants a rival eliminated, and that's fine. But then a witness survives, the attorney starts acting weird, this big cop Davenport gets on her case, and loose ends begin popping up faster than a sweater unraveling. Clara hates loose ends, and knows of only one way to deal with them: You start cutting them off, one after another, until they're all gone. Lucas thinks the case is worrisome enough, but he has no idea of the toll it is about to take on him. For of the many criminals he has hunted during his life, none has been as efficient or as ferociously intelligent as the one who is about to start hunting him - and none knows so well what his weak spots are ... and how to penetrate them.

HUNTING DOWN AMANDA by Andrew Klavan

Lonnie Blake's life and career have been on the skids since his wife was murdered eighteen months ago. Then one chilly autumn night Carol Dodson steps suddenly out of the city darkness and asks him to take her in. For that one night Lonnie and Carol become lovers as Carol, a sometime prostitute, agrees to pretend she's the woman Lonnie loved and tragically lost. Long after Carol is gone, Lonnie remembers her and the passion she rekindled in him, the passion he thought had died. Finally, obsessed, he begins to follow her - and so is led on by desire into a world of sudden danger and sudden death, a swiftly closing trap of intrigue and murder. Because Carol is not what she seems. Though apparently a lost soul of the streets, she is in fact the lone guardian of an incredible secret and the desperately resourceful prey of an unstoppable hunt. And before Lonnie can set eyes - and hands - and lips on her again, he will also learn that secret, the secret of an extraordinary little girl named Amanda. And he will also become a target, isolated and wanted not only by the police but by a crack team of international killers willing to murder anyone who gets in their way.

The Redhunter : A Novel Based on the Life of Senator Joe McCarthy
by William F. Buckley Jr.

"I have here in my hand....a list of names that were made known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department."

From America's most celebrated conservative writer, William F. Buckley Jr., comes an engrossing and unexpected historical novel about one of the most controversial figures in American political history - Senator Joe McCarthy.

Senator McCarthy rose and fell in just four years, yet he gave a name, lastingly, to an era. In 1952 he was the most lionized and the most hated man in America. But little was known about the man or his background. McCarthy's personal charm and single-minded determination took him from Wisconsin and his indigent life as a chicken farmer to Washington, D.C., as the youngest United States senator. But it wasn't until February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, that McCarthy bewitched the nation - and unleashed a crusade - with his claim that Communists had infiltrated the United States government.

In THE REDHUNTER, a wonderful blend of fact and fiction, Buckley tells the story of Harry Bontecou. Freshly graduated from Columbia, Bontecou joins McCarthy and remains at his side for three critical years. But when McCarthy's judgment becomes clouded by prosecution zeal and reckless extravagance, Bontecou delivers the ultimatum: McCarthy must choose between Bontecou and Roy Cohn, McCarthy's ruthless aide. By then we have seen at close hand Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, J. Edgar Hoover, and Dean Acheson in memorable portraits of leaders in action.

This book takes the radical position that great companies can fail precisely because they do everything right. It demonstrates why outstanding companies that had their competitive antennae up, listened astutely to customers, and invested aggressively in new technologies still lost their market leadership when confronted with disruptive changes in technology and market structure. And it tells how to avoid a similar fate. Using the lessons of successes and failures of leading companies, The Innovator's Dilemma presents a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation. These principles will help managers determine when it is right not to listen to customers, when to invest in developing lower-performance products that promise lower margins, and when to pursue small markets at the expense of seemingly larger and more lucrative ones.

Betrayal by Bill Gertz

Defense reporter Bill Gertz tells the whole story of how the Clinton administration has sold out the national security and has gone to great lengths to cover it up. Gertz uses his extensive sources within the government and his unrivaled access to confidential documents to expose the Clinton administration's deadly deals for political gain.

Straight off the Los Angeles Times bestseller list, ULTIMATE JUSTICE is a gripping legal thriller by the author of PURSUIT OF JUSTICE In Mimi Latt's latest, a young assistant D.A. finds herself reopening a case when new evidence comes to light -- implicating her own father.

J. K. Rowling Mary Grandpre (Illustrator)

The Dursleys were so mean and hideous that summer that all Harry Potter wanted was to get back to the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. But just as he's packing his bags, Harry receives a warning from a strange, impish creature named Dobby who says that if Harry Potter returns to Hogwarts, disaster will strike.

And strike it does. For in Harry's second year at Hogwarts, fresh torments and horrors arise, including an outrageously stuck-up new professor, Gilderoy Lockheart, a spirit named Moaning Myrtle who haunts the girls' bathroom, and the unwanted attentions of Ron Weasley's younger sister, Ginny.

But each of these seem minor annoyances when the real trouble begins, and someone — or something — starts turning Hogwarts students to stone. Could it be Draco Malfoy, a more poisonous rival than ever? Could it possibly be Hagrid, whose mysterious past is finally told? Or could it be the one everyone at Hogwarts most suspects...Harry Potter himself!

For the first time in nearly twenty years, George Lucas is releasing a new adventure in his big-screen epic: Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. With a new generation excited by the theatrical release of the Special Editions in 1997, this film is what fans have been waiting for: the story that ties the saga together. Now, that story comes into print with the novel by Terry Brooks...

Granny Dan

In my eyes she had always been old, always been mine, always been Granny Dan. But in another time, another place, there had been dancing, people, laughter, love. . . . She had had another life before she came to us, long before she came to me. . . .
She was the cherished grandmother who sang songs in Russian, loved to roller-skate, and spoke little of her past. But when Granny Dan died, all that remained was a box wrapped in brown paper, tied with string. Inside, an old pair of satin toe shoes, a gold locket, and a stack of letters tied with ribbon. It was her legacy, her secret past, waiting to be discovered by the granddaughter who loved her but never really knew her. It was a story waiting to be told. . . .The year was 1902. A new century was dawning as a motherless young girl arrived at a ballet school in St. Petersburg, Russia, at the age of seven. By age seventeen, Danina Petroskova had become a great ballerina, a favorite of the Czar and Czarina, who welcomed her into the heart of the Imperial family. But events both near and far away shook the ground upon which she danced. A war, an extraordinary man, and a devastating illness altered the course of her life. And when revolution shattered Russia, Danina Petroskova was forced to make a heartbreaking choice--as the world around her was about to change forever.

Granny Dan is about the magic of history. In it, Danielle Steel reminds us how little we know of those who came before us--and how, if we could only glimpse into their early lives, and see who they once were, there is so much we would understand and learn. For in this extraordinary novel, a simple box, filled with mementos from a grandmother, offers the greatest legacy of all: an unexpected gift of a life transformed, a long-forgotten history of youth and beauty, love and dreams.

From the founder and Chairman of Netscape comes a thrilling, first-hand account of the race to beat Microsoft for control of the information superhighway — a power struggle that continues to make headlines.

Like James Watson's landmark The Double Helix, which not only informed us how DNA was discovered but how one of the greatest scientific revolutions of the twentieth century came to pass, Netscape Time, written by the company's founder, Jim Clark, provides us with an insider's recounting of how the Internet came to be. Clark reveals how the invention of a simple web browser revolutionized the way human beings communicate.

Motivated by a loathing of Bill Gates and a ruthless desire to stop him, Jim Clark, a former computer science professor at Stanford, wanted to create a company in 1994 that would become a player in Silicon Valley. Clark's account of how he transformed a motley crew of misfits and computer geeks into the Internet giant Netscape not only makes for thrilling reading, it provides us with one of the most important eyewitness accounts of the computer revolution at the end of the twentieth century.

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