Levardis Robert Martyn "LeVar" Burton Jr. is an actor, director, and educator who has been an icon for more than 35 years. He was the host and producer of the influential television program Reading Rainbow for more than three decades, and starred in the TV miniseries Roots and on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He lives in Sherman Oaks, California.
American civilization crumbles after a civil war pitting blacks against whites and a devastating earthquake. Salvation resides in the hands of a black woman scientist, Dr. Rene Reynolds, inventor of a neuroenhancer that cures all diseases. When she is kidnapped, her telepathic cry for help reaches three people who travel across the country to save her. Star TrekR actor Burton's characterizations are shallow, transitions between events betray a TV-like impatience, and the plot was rendered better in Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven's Lucifer's Hammer (Fawcett, 1985). Buy only on demand.
Another Star Trek alumnus gets bitten by the writing bug. Here, it's Burton, who played Lt. Cmdr. Geordi LaForge on Star Trek: The Next Generation. His fiction debut is a terribly earnest and straightforward novel about the horrors that occur after America is shattered by a breakdown in race relations. Dr. Rene Reynolds is the inventor of the Neuro-Enhancer, a device with almost mystical healing abilities that also creates telepathic powers in its wearers. After Reynolds demonstrates the device to financiers, she is kidnapped‘but not before she desperately thrusts the only existing copies of her computer disks into the hands of a homeless man, Leon Cane, whose life was shattered during the race riots. When Reynolds sends out a telepathic call for help, Cane, Amy LaDue, a plucky child living on the streets, and Jacob Fire Cloud, a Lakota medicine man with a vision, head toward Chicago to aid her and to save the world from destruction. Burton's workmanlike prose is sufficient for the task of displaying his characters' virtues, but the world he builds is muddled and less than credible. His name recognition, however, along with the novel's humane and caring moral message, should ensure respectable sales. Author tour. (Jan.)
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