by John Jakes
For those millions who loved the seven earlier volumes about the Kent family—they've sold nearly 26 million copies—here is more of the same. It's 1883. Gideon Kent is a Boston book publisher. Son Will gets some advice from Teddy Roosevelt and survives a lurid sex scene on a stormy beach to become a doctor. His stepbrother Carter gets kicked out of Harvard and goes West, where he meets Willie Hearst and gets into politics. Sister Eleanor is an actress, and everyone knows what shameless lives they lead. She falls in love with a Jew. The episodes flow like the useless whey from a cheese factory. It's history as soap opera, with the clichés of character and scene so familiar that the book reads like a condensation of a dozen better novels—a Western, a saga of the Johnstown flood, a political novel, a worthy doctor yarn. The mind glazes every few pages (there are 800), but there is no writer who can bring off this surface-slick prose as effortlessly as John Jakes. (Jove, $2.95 paperback)
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