A Cure for Gravity by Arthur Rosenfeld
 | A
literary novel - Forge Books Published 2000  |
Editorial Review From Publisher's Weekly:
In this messy but charming tale of one teenage boy's lucky bank robbery, Arthur Rosenfeld takes us not only cross-country, from South Florida to Port Townsend, Wash., but also across a few spiritual dimensions, such as the one separating life and death. The boy, Umberto Santana, robs a bank in Boca Raton on the day when the bills are unmarked. The bank has brought in this money for Suzanne Emerson, an heiress with a taste for expensive antique automobiles, who wants cash on hand so that she can drive a hard bargain at an upcoming auction. Umberto's dumb luck holds as he gets out of town on his Honda. His cross-country trip is lonely, however, until he meets up with Mercury Gant, who is also fleeing Florida, on his 20-year-old motorcycle. Gant is trying to shake his memories of his ex-lover, Caroline, who was lovely, smart and gruesomely widowed; her husband apparently shot himself and their boy, Xavier. Or did he? That story unfurls in Gant's mind as he makes his way to the last bit of his recent past--his daughter, living with Caroline's mother in Port Townsend. Meanwhile, in Florida, Umberto's robbery has caused some excitement: a U.S. senator in the bank at the time died of an asthma attack brought on by stress, and her husband is out for the perpetrator's blood. Eagle Cooper, the FBI agent investigating the case, quickly falls in love with beautiful Suzanne. When Umberto's father uses cash to buy a Jaguar from Suzanne, Eagle closes in, and a sadder, wiser Umberto performs a charitable act. Rosenfeld throws too many subplots into his zany mix, and the dialogue is often corny, but there's a bravura innocence at the heart of this offbeat novel that eventually wins the reader's affection.
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Miami Florida Herald, December 3, 2000
and
The News of Birmingham, Alabama, December 10, 2000
by Fred Grimm
THE CAPTAIN AND THE FBI AGENT HAVE A MID-AIR MEETING OF THE MINDS
The lone biographical note attached to "A Cure for Gravity" says nothing about the author's job, his family, his history, his previous literary pursuits. It says: "Arthur Rosenfeld is a multiple Black Belt holder in Chinese Martial Arts. He lives in Boca Florida."
That's all. It may be enough.
A "multiple Black Belt" inspires a certain hesitation in a critic who might otherwise be tempted to employ judicious language to describe Rosenfeld's construction of fantastic detours along a traditional crossroad novel. His tale links an excessively cool young Cuban-American bank robber fleeing the FBI and South Florida on his powerful new black motorcycle with a saddlebag stuffed with loot and an excessively cool middle-aged Anglo fishing boat captain fleeing his past and South Florida on a powerful old classic motorcycle.
A critic not cowed by the specter of black belt revenge might make much of how Rosenfeld's protagonists first meet - in Oklahoma, in midair - hoisted aloft by a tornado, carried by the twister higher than a silo, before men and cycles settle safely on a cushion of corn kernels.
A less cautious critic might suggest that this journey across the United States has been littered with comic-book touches. Even character names seemed to have been snatched from the genre. The captain, haunted by his past and a number of ghosts, was christened Mercury Gant. The cool FBI agent is Eagle Cooper.
Women are drawn in the exaggerated, bulging perfection of the comics. "Gant tries to relax but it's hard... with Caroline in a skintight black leather bustier and skirt, her muscular arms showing arid her strong legs too. He wonders for the hundredth time how she can have such tone. She'd have to work out every day and he knows that she doesn't... Can it be steroids? Can it be genes?"
Or exotic Cuban beauty Graciela, beautiful and pouty with muscular thighs vividly described in two separate passages. A braver critic might have suggested the women would have been better outfitted with cartoon balloons instead of dialogue.
This might have been a novel about self-discovery and friendship, love and redemption and an ordinary bank robbery. But ghosts intervene. Incredible coincidences bend the plot. And Gant channels the dead. All the fellows seem nagged, too, by a whispering homunculus, a word Rosenfeld favors. And much of the story is built around such a murdering sociopath, so evil, so hideous in her crimes, so beautiful that she seems without human dimensions.
Yet "A Cure for Gravity" roars along at the pace of an open throttled motorcycle. Some nicely crafted passages carry the protagonists through New Orleans and Santa Fe and other nicely recalled places as they careen toward the Great Northwest and a rendezvous with a blind child, some good ghosts and an evil specter.
A braver critic might throw in a "Pow!" Or a "Bam!" But my homunculus whispers, "Multiple Black Belt."
The Boca Raton News of Boca Raton, Florida
October 1, 2000
TOURING TO PROMOTE A BOOK IS OFTEN A GRUELING EXERCISE. ARTHUR ROSENFELD IS RAISING THE BAR CONSIDERABLY.
On Oct. 7, Rosenfeld, author of the fantasy road novel "A Cure For Gravity" leaves home and hearth in the Estates Section of Boca Raton on a new BMW 115 GS motorcycle. His tour will take him to San Francisco and back, with stops in Austin, Tucson and Phoenix, among other places, for a welcome home party at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 8 at Liberties in Mizner Park.
"BMW offered to lend me a test bike, and I found it hard to resist," explains Rosenfeld over lunch in Mizner Park. "The main character of the book does ride a BMW, so it's a good tie-in for them. I always welcome the opportunity to take a good motorcycle trip, and this one has a double purpose.
"A Cure for Gravity" centers on the unlikely friendship of 17-year-old motorcycle mechanic Umberto Santana, who robs a bank in Boca Raton and hits the jackpot with more than $300,000 cash, and Mercury Gant, a strong, stoic type of Rosenfeld's approximate age of 43, who has been working as a chauffeur and running boat charters at the Boca Raton Resort and Club.
Gant has decided to split town on his BMW touring motorcycle to get a breather and get over a torrid love affair that has gone wrong.
Santana, who has left South Florida on a frighteningly fast new Triumph, meets Gant on the road, where they bond when they are almost exterminated by a tornado in Kansas (a tornado being one definition for "a cure for gravity").
The younger and older men have their share of adventures on the road, but meanwhile things back in Florida are reaching a boil. A prominent woman senator who was witness to Umberto's robbery dies of an asthma attack, and her husband thinks Umberto should be charged with murder along with robbery. Coincidentally, Umberto's girlfriend Graciela is pregnant.
A woman with whom Gant has had a brief fling and who has endured a terrible tragedy in her family proves more treacherous than he ever could have imagined.
On the far West Coast, an elderly woman and her blind granddaughter share a mystical communion with Gant, who will intervene in their lives deus ex machina style.
Already praised by Jack Parr, Larry Gelbert, Barbara Taylor Bradford and Neil Simon, "A Cure for Gravity" is a constantly flowing mix of jarring, earthbound reality and soaring flights of fancy. For Rosenfeld, son of a prominent New York City doctor, its the way life could, or should be.
"My personal metaphysics, developed over the years, have given me a very clear view of the world," he explains. "Most people only see the surface of the lake. At best they can see about four inches down, but there is so much more to reality deeper down. The so-called fantastical part of my work - ghosts, spirits, telepathy, prescience - are all a part of a deeper reality. That's what I love about fiction. You can mold your own reality."
The reality of Rosenfeld's motorcycling vagabonds is routed In his own experience as a motorcycle writer.
"Every place I have been to on two wheels, he reveals. From the mid 19810's to the early 90s I was a touring journalist: a writer living in California who liked to ride a bike."
The mystical part of the equation derives in part from Rosenfeld's lifelong study of eastern thought. The vivid natural imagery comes from his lifelong interest in conservation, particularly of endangered species. The physical part emanates from his devotion to martial arts. Rosenfeld has the honored title Sifu Arthur Rosenfeld for his mastery of Tai Chi, which he teaches locally.
"This is the book I have always wanted to write," explains Rosenfeld, who has published several novels as well as countless magazine articles. 'It's an opportunity to create a world as I see it. Some people call this magical realism. It's very flattering that some people have compared my work to Marquez. Actually my work is rooted in my Russian ancestry and the literary greats: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Turgenev."
Another layer to the reality of Arthur Rosenfeld is that he is a first-time father to son Tasman, just six months old. "A Cure for Gravity" is dedicated to 'Tasman and his wife Janelle, a hospital administrator.
"There are new pressures and responsibilities," he admits. "I have to be mindful of material security. My own needs are the same as some guy In Calcutta. The mind is another matter. I have no choice but to write. If I can create a seamless interface between normal reality and extended reality, I believe I can more accurately render the human condition."
The Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Florida
October 1, 2000
by Chauncey Mabe
AN UPLIFTING TRIP OF MAGICAL REALISM
Arthur Rosenfeld's "A Cure for Gravity" is possibly the most unclassifiable novel of the year. Buddy story? Comic crime novel? Tale of the open road? Ghost story? Love story? Child abduction story? Let's just call it noirish magical realism - of a high order - and be done with it.
At any rate, "A Cure for Gravity" is the kind of stunning surprise that comes along once a year, if we're lucky. It's like expecting a $90 bicycle for Christmas, and getting a brand new Harley instead.
The motorcycle analogy is apt, because the spine of the novel is across-country road trip that brings two bike-loving men together in bonds of grudging friendship.
Vietnam vet Mercury Gant heads west from Deerfield Beach on a vintage BMW in search of his past; 17-year-old Umberto Santana flees Miami on a sleek new Honda in pursuit of what he hopes is a golden future. The two meet in the Oklahoma panhandle - during a tornado that lifts both men, still astride their motorcycles, 300 feet into the air.
"Gant gets the dry heaves from an excess of adrenaline. Umberto feels his bladder go. A plastic panel flies off the Honda, and a saddlebag follows suit. Gant's tank bag is shredded. His map hovers before him, shows him the great expanse of the United States, then evaporates into atoms. A barn cat zooms by, claws out like a cartoon character, mouth wide open, eyes bulging, fur erect."
This is the key scene in the book. It comes early and goes by fast - starting on page 58 and barely four astonishing pages later its over - and it signals for the first time that Rosenfeld, a Boca Raton author whose previous books have been mass-market paperbacks, has the skill to bring off the complicated conjuring trick he has invited the reader to share with him.
Of course it is ludicrous to suppose that human beings could live through such an experience, but Rosenfeld not only makes their survival believable, he brings the scene back to earth with a series of grace notes. During their flight, both men wind up on the same motorcycle as Gant saves Umberto's life. Here's what they see when they touch down in a wrecked grain silo:
"Without a word, they turn the bike around and half ride, half push it out through the hole in the silo and into the sunshine. All around them, stunned sparrows lie fluttering on the field, little wings twitching, little beaks opening and closing, free of the vacuum of low pressure, oxygen finally restored. Gant begins setting them on their feet."
From that point on, Gant and Umberto travel west together, getting to know each other, forging first a friendship, then something like a father-son relationship. Both men have secrets. Umberto robbed a South Florida bank, getting away with more than $300,000; he left behind a drunken father, a prostitute mother, and a sweet, beautiful girlfriend who, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant.
Gant's past is deeper, darker, more haunted. Giving away much of it would rob potential readers of the suspense and fun of this book, but suffice it to say that it involves murder, the police, and a lovely, troubled woman whose ghost appears to Gant, walking down the street, every few days.
Rosenfeld approaches his story with a daring, quick-cut structure. He leaps from character to character, offering a bit here, a bit there, until the whole of Umberto's story and Gant's story, not to mention the story they create by their friendship, comes into focus. The author never hurries, never dallies. He gives all of the characters, not merely the principles, their due with a generosity that keeps all but the most monstrous from seeming like villains.
Umberto's parents at first seem despicable; by the end we not only understand them, but also like and root for them. Eagle Cooper, the FBI agent on Umberto's trail, is more than a squint-eyed Fed; he's a fully developed human being who discovers an opportunity for love along the way. Indeed, there is far more in this novel than can be adequately summarized here. Hovering throughout the narrative is the subplot of a blind, perhaps psychically gifted, 6-year-old girl who lives with her grandmother in the Pacific Northwest. Coincidentally, that's Gant's final destination. To say more would be irresponsible.
One of the things that distinguishes magical realism from fantasy or sci-fi is that the realism governs the magic, not the other way around; there's no disconnect between the fantastic and the everyday. Unheralded though he is, Rosenfeld shows himself a master at this deceptively difficult specialty.
The result is a literary novel with the verve and entertainment value of good pulp fiction. Even more important than the magic however, is the author's refusal to pass judgment on his own creations. In the end, this is a story about second chances - guilt is the gravity of which characters here are cured. It will be the rare reader who turns the last page without a lump in the throat and a smile on the lips.
The New York Daily News
October 15, 2000
by Sherryl Connelly
HAUNTED HIGHWAYS - A SWEET AND MYSTICAL 'ON THE ROAD' NOVEL
As a general rule - Alice Hoffman aside - ghosts mostly belong in ghost stories, since introducing one or more into a novel otherwise rooted in reality instantly relieves a plot of credibility. But in "A Cure for Gravity;" Arthur Rosenfeld integrates a few ethereal beings as well as some magical developments without sacrificing the edge essential to a book about two bikers outriding the law.
Umberto Santana is a 17-year-old whose father is a full-time drunk and whose mother is a prostitute. Showing uncommon initiative, be robs a bank, escaping with an unexpectedly large haul - $360,000 - and without noticing that a panicked woman is dying on the floor of an asthma attack.
She is a United States Senator and her death, never mind the robbery; makes Santana a very much wanted man. It is, of course, necessary for him to leave Boca Raton. What better time in a young man's life to get on the bike and see the country?
Somewhere in Oklahoma, a twister seizes him and he makes the acquaintance of another biker caught mid-air in the same funnel. In his late 30s, Mercury Gant has a few years on Santana and - after they come to ground unhurt - some things to teach him about life.
In time, Ganz also will be the subject of an all-points bulletin but, as he and Santana find harmony together on the highway, he's merely a man on a mission. He doesn't disclose what it is, for in keeping with the road novel tradition, the two communicate on that plane beyond mere words.
Rosenfeld's story pulls together a lovely array of characters, some joined to the central drama more obviously than others. The novel's ultimate ambition is to reveal all the connections.
So it is we're presented with FBI agent Eagle Cooper's unfolding romance with Suzanne Emerson, a stockbroker he meets in the course of pursuing a lead to Santana. It takes longer to tease out the tale of Caroline, a beautiful blond who has attached her soul to Ganz (according to a fortune teller) and who is shown to have played a pivotal role in his life.
Meanwhile, in a small Oregon town, 66-year-old Ruth Bishop tenderly cares for her blind 6-year-old granddaughter, waiting for someone - who? - to come. But when the child wanders off, and days pass without her being located, it seems that if the mysterious other does turn up, it will be too late.
In the end, Rosenfeld uses the tangle of lives he has created to tell a story that has its mystical moments - the lost child is guarded by the presence of her dead grandfather, for instance - but is every bit about the needs of the living. This makes it a love story of course, and a sweet, telling one at that.
Miscellaneous Reviews
Praise for Arthur Rosenfeld’s "A CURE FOR GRAVITY"
"[A] charming tale. . . . There's a bravura innocence at the heart of this offbeat novel."
- Publishers Weekly
"A zesty, comic, high-speed American gothic."
- Kirkus Reviews
"A touching ghost story that eludes easy comparison to any other book.... An amazing voyage that is as rewarding for the reader as it is for the protagonists."
- Booklist
"'A Cure for Gravity' is the kind of stunning surprise that comes along once a year, if we're lucky. It's like expecting a S90 bicycle for Christmas, and getting a brand new Harley instead. ... It will be the rare reader who turns the last page without a lump in the throat and a smile on the lips."
- South Florida Sun-Sentinel
"Rosenfeld uses the tangle of lives he has created to tell a story that has its mystical moments-but is every bit about the needs of the living. This makes it a love story, of course, and a sweet, telling one at that."
- The New York Daily News -
"A Cure for Gravity may be seen as mainstream fiction, that just happens to be fast, funny, outrageous, and full of heart."
- The San Jose Mercury News
"A Cure for Gravity roars along at the pace of an open-throttled motorcycle."
- The Tribune, South Bend, IN
"A Cure for Gravity, by Arthur Rosenfeld, is a charming tale of one teen-age boy's lucky bank robbery that takes us not only cross-country, but also across a few spiritual dimensions such as the one separating life and death."
- The Daily Courier, Prescott, AZ
"A Cure for Gravity is a constantly flowing mix of jarring, earthbound reality and soaring flights of fancy.... It's the way life could, or should be."
- The Boca Raton News
"A novel of surprising imagination and stylistic daring. . .. A Cure for Gravity rises to near greatness as a piece of home-grown Magical Realism. Touching, scary, hilarious."
- Knight Ridder News Service
"This wonderful novel doesn't just cure gravity, it cures all matters of heart, mind, and soul. I felt better after reading the title alone, imagine how I felt after reading the whole book."
-Neil Simon, Pulitzer Prize - winning playwright of The Odd Couple, Lost in Yonkers, and Brighton Beach Memoirs.
"Rosenfeld has woven a very unusual yarn that intrigues and grips the reader. A colorful collection of unique but believable characters, thrown together in a series of bizarre event help to create an imaginative and suspenseful tale that doesn't let up until the last page."
- Barbara Taylor Bradford, New York Times bestselling author of Where You Belong
"This book is like reading a story and listening to music at the same time. A page-tunnel with rhythm, and a most unusual narrative voice. I loved the characters, the views of au America I haven't seen, the unexpected twists and turns. A wonderful book."
- Jack Paar, former host of The Tonight Show
"Mr. Rosenfeld's work inspires the deepest emotion one writer can feel about another: envy. These days I manage to get through barely two books a year. Having just finished "A Cure for Gravity" (its title being only the first of the many treats in the pages which follow), I am now ready for my second-which will be a rereading of this amazing book.
- Larry Gelbart, creator of M*A*S*H, Tootsie, and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
"Arthur Rosenfeld's "A Cure for Gravity" is a noir mystery, a supernatural thriller, a crime caper novel, a love story, and an American road-trip adventure-all seamlessly woven ml one moving, magical book. If the ghosts of Jack Kerouac and Jim Thompson could collaborate with Alice Hoffman, this is the story they might write. . .. This novel twists, spins, and rages like an Oklahoma tornado, and it'll fling you up into the cruel sky before bringing you back down to the good earth. . . safe, but shaken. Hell, it'll make you fly."
- Bradley Denton, author of BLACK BURN and LUNATICS
Kirkus Reviews
August 15, 2000
Beset by ghosts, cops, and a nasty tornado, a bank robber and a drifter meet by chance in a picaresque cross-country road tip.
Seventeen-year-old Umberto Santana thinks he's just pulled off a perfect $300,000 robbery of a Boca Raton bank when he hops on his Honda and flees west. Simultaneously, enigmatic almost-middle-aged Mercury Gant, a former limo driver living on the outskirts of town, wraps himself in a leather Australian cattle-drover's coat and zooms off on his own motorcycle, a BMW, fleeing from tormenting memories of a double-suicide that might have resulted from an affair he had with a female passenger. Meanwhile, Audrey, a blind, telepathic girl living with her grandmother in a Washington state fishing town wonders whether she'll ever find her parents. En route, Santana learns that the woman who had a heart attack and died during his robbery was a US senator and that manic, macho FBI Special Agent Eagle Cooper is on his tail. Gant imagines seeing his former lover in impossible places - proof, a fairground fortune-teller informs him, that he's beset by restless spirits. Shortly after their paths cross, Santana and Gant survive a wild ride in a whirling tornado, a homicidal trucker, a hissing rattlesnake and other over-the-top roadside emergencies, eventually coming to terms with the fate, and the women, awaiting them at the end of their long quest - one that ends with justice and spiritual destiny triumphing in unexpected ways. As Barry Gifford does in his epic Grand Guignol odysseys, first-novelist Rosenfeld paces the long miles between plot twists with garish, violent, and frequently amusing set-pieces about lust and aspirations of numerous minor players, from Santana's pregnant lover Graciela to Agent Cooper's randy car-collecting mistress Suzanne.
Awkward analogies ("clouds gathered like councilmen") and a tendency to indicate Hispanic speakers by substituting "ju" for "you" ('ju kiddin' me?' etc.) are minor distractions in a zesty, comic, high-speed American gothic.
Publishers Weekly
July 10, 2000
In this messy but charming tale of one teenage boy's lucky bank robbery, Arthur Rosenfeld takes us not only cross-country, from South Florida to Port Townsend, Wash., but also across a few spiritual dimensions, such as the one separating life and death. The boy, Umberto Santana, robs a bank in Boca Raton on the day when the bills are unmarked. The bank has brought in this money for Suzanne Emerson, an heiress with a taste for expensive antique automobiles, who wants cash on hand so that she can drive a bard bargain at an upcoming auction. Umberto's dumb luck holds as he gets out of town on his Honda. His cross-country trip is lonely, however, until he meets up with Mercury Gant, who is also fleeing Florida, on his 20-year-old motorcycle. Gant is trying to shake his memories of his ex-lover, Caroline, who was lovely, smart and gruesomely widowed; her husband apparently shot himself and their boy, Xavier. Or did he? That story unfurls in Gant's mind as he makes his way to the last bit of his recent past - his daughter, living with Caroline's mother in Port Townsend. Meanwhile, in Florida, Umberto's robbery has caused some excitement: a U.S. senator in the bank at the time died of an asthma attack brought on by stress, and her husband is out for the perpetrator's blood. Eagle Cooper, the FBI agent investigating the case, quickly falls in love with beautiful Suzanne. When Umberto's father uses cash to buy a Jaguar from Suzanne, Eagle closes in, and a sadder, wiser Umberto performs a charitable act. Rosenfeld throws too many subplots into his zany mix, and the dialogue is often corny, but there's a bravura innocence at the heart of this offbeat novel that eventually wins the reader's affection.
The Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Florida
by Chauncey Mabe
CONTEMPLATING THE BEST OF 2000
Rosenfeld, who lives in Boca Raton, produced a novel of surprising imagination and stylistic daring. At heart a comic crime novel, "A Cure for Gravity" rises to near greatness as a piece of home-grown Magical Realism. Touching, scary, hilarious.
Booklist
August 2000
by George Needham
Mercury Gant and Umberto Santana are about as different as two cross-country motorcyclists can be. (Gant is full of uncertainty, heading west to meet the six-year-old daughter he didn't know he had. Santana is fleeing a bank robbery during which a U.S. Senator happened to die from an asthma attack. Thrown together (literally) by a tornado in the Oklahoma panhandle, the two decide to ride together as well. This précis doesn't begin to explain the complexity and delicate layering of Rosenfeld's picaresque novel. Combining a realistic narrative technique with elements of magic and the occult, the author creates a touching ghost story that eludes easy comparison to any other book. Where else will you find the character like Gant's daughter, Audrey, who is blind but can communicate with whales and whose other senses are so highly developed that she can navigate a runaway shopping cart through expressway traffic? An amazing voyage that is as rewarding for the reader as it is for the protagonists.
Publishers Weekly
July 10, 2000
In this messy but charming tale of one teenage boy's lucky bank robbery, Arthur Rosenfeld takes us not only cross-country, from South Florida to Port Townsend, Wash., but also across a few spiritual dimensions, such as the one separating life and death. The boy, Umberto Santana, robs a bank in Boca Baton on the day when the bills are unmarked. The bank has brought in this money for Suzanne Emerson, an heiress with a taste for expensive antique automobiles, who wants cash on hand so that she can drive a hard bargain at an upcoming auction. Umberto's dumb luck holds as he gets out of town on his Honda. His cross-country trip is lonely, however, until he meets up with Mercury Gant, who is also fleeing Florida, on his 20-year-old motorcycle. Gant is trying to shake his memories of his ex-lover, Caroline, who was lovely, smart and gruesomely widowed; her husband apparently shot himself and their boy, Xavier. Or did he? That story unfurls in Gant's mind as he makes his way to the last bit of his recent past-his daughter, living with Caroline's mother in Port Townsend. Meanwhile, in Florida, Umberto's robbery has caused some excitement: a U.S. Senator in the bank at the time died of an asthma attack brought on by stress, and her husband is out for the perpetrator's blood. Eagle Cooper, the FBI agent investigating the case, quickly falls in love with beautiful Suzanne. When Umberto's father uses cash to buy a Jaguar from Suzanne, Eagle closes in, and a sadder, wiser Umberto performs a charitable act. Rosenfeld throws too many subplots into his zany mix, and the dialogue is often corny, but there's a bravura innocence at the heart of this offbeat novel that eventually wins the reader's affection.
Amazon.com
Reader Reviews
***** Some of the best character development I've enjoyed, July 28, 2001
Reviewer: Robert Ashby from Renton, WA
Two men from different pasts come together under the most incredible circumstances. Mr. Rosenfeld has made the main characters credible and absolutely captivating. From the very first paragraph, you will be drawn in. You will never forget Umberto Santana, Mercury Gant, or any of the other players in this story thats part road movie and part Pulp Fiction. Thanks you Mr. Rosenfeld.
***** Where I've Never Gone Before, January 29, 2001
Reviewer: Kinney Thiele from Menlo Park, CA
"A CURE FOR GRAVITY" is a (motorcyle) tour de force. The scenes are countless, brief, heavily loaded with information in short sentences, and all lead to a tightly woven conclusion. Arthur Rosenfeld wastes no words, nor spares us the details to take us to places we might never know - could exist - in space and in the mind. Nothing is gratuitous. He isn't afraid to take on issues of morality, to extoll beauty, to introduce flights of fancy, or rub our faces in horror. I was enthralled by the author's talent and hooked on the story from beginning to end. Excellent. Excellent.
***** A Modern Novel -Fast Paced and Fun, October 9, 2000
Reviewer: Howard Korn from Beltsville, MD
"The Cure for Gravity" is a modern novel in the best sense. It moves quickly like modern life with a fast stepping story line filled with adventures, quirky characters - all of whom you'll like - And some way out sub-plots. You'll almost feel like you're riding a bike on the California coast on one page and sailing off Florida on the next. There's just enough tension drawn on the situations our heros are in as well as the anticipated resolving of story lines to keep the pages turning.
***** Fresh and lovely writing, September 21, 2000
Reviewer: A reader from Boca Raton, FL I could not put this book down! The writing is wonderfully fresh and the story is captivating. With rich characters tied together by serindipity and themes of love and friendship to murder and betrayal, this book was a delight to read. I laughed, I cried...I wanted more when it ended. Rosenfeld's thought provoking ideas and magical tones make this book a must read. I can't wait for the movie!
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