Word: punks
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Marjoe. Hype about a hypester. A punk Gantry tells of all his wicked evangelicizing way in this typical cinema-verite cop-out. (The city slickers seem to love...
Four parts remain, with Italian palazzi to be used as backdrops and famous ladies like Isabella d'Este to be viewed. Painting the Last Supper on the wall of Milano's Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, experimenting with flight and war machines, feuding with that young punk and fellow genius Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci may yet prove that not even television can keep a good Renaissance man down...
...outline, an unprepossessing story-a punk's progress. In this first novel, Theodore Weesner's tones are flat, sometimes excessively precise. Yet the book develops a building power. It is, for one thing, an achievement of almost perfect sympathy. One begins caring about Alex-his guilt, his daydreams, his bewildered adolescent innocence. Descendants of Huckleberry Finn, Alex and his brother do cannonball dives into the polluted muck of an urban river, cracking exuberant and forlorn scatological jokes about what they are swimming...
...Since the caper gives events a trap-like structure, without closing out the growth of characterization, Ballard's lights make the settings eloquent without making them overbearing. When Cook is shot by his wife, he falls where his apartment's worn carpet catches streetlight. A parakeet screeches over the punk's fallen body, and the scene and the sound and Cook's tortured look express the squelching of a small man's daydreams...
...dubious measures it dictates, the book attacks not only this future society but the unthinking few who rebel from it. Alex, the narrator, is the fifteen-year-old leader of a street gang, one of many which terrorize unwary citizens in poorly-policed night hours. He is a sadistic punk, only a little better than the authority figures he confronts, and no better than the elders he kills and rapes. If his NADSAT slang, composed of Russian, rock and road talk, is an attractive reaction against official jargon, the scientific tomes of a donnish type and the antique knick-knacks...