An involving, skillfully told tale of the after-emotions of 9/11 and the internal conflicts experienced by U.S. personnel in...
After barely surviving the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon, and having his wife maimed while escaping the attack on the World Trade Center, U.S. Navy officer Dan Lenson reconsiders retiring and becomes embroiled in the search for Osama bin Laden.
Poyer, who has drawn on his considerable experience as a naval officer in crafting the popular Lenson series (The Weapon, 2009, etc.), likely had no reason when he was writing this book to believe it would be upstaged by the actual discovery and disposal of bin Laden. That Obama administration triumph unavoidably takes some of the edge off this story. But plot isn't what drives the book as much as procedure. It still succeeds as a detailed examination of how the government and the military work together, or don't, in such pressure-backed situations—and in such hostile territory as the frigid expanse of Afghanistan, urban Bagram and pre-revolt Yemen. Poyer couldn't be more authoritative in imparting chains of command, strategy, weaponry and terrain. On September 10, 2011, Lenson is in the Washington suburbs licking his wounds, having been passed over for captain despite his Navy Cross and Silver Star. His superiors don't like his independent streak. Former SEAL sniper Teddy Oberg is in Los Angeles, having left the Navy to produce war movies. The 9/11 attacks draw both men back to the Middle East. Meanwhile, federal special agent Aisha Ar-Rahim, an Arab-American working counterterrorism in Yemen, discovers the racial stereotyping she had to deal with a day earlier are nothing compared to the nastiness after 9/11. The book is short on suspense, and the opening descriptions of the World Trade Center disaster add nothing to our understanding. But with its sure characterizations and blow-by-blow descriptions, it does a great job putting you in the middle of the action and conveying the vast odds against military success in Afghanistan.
An involving, skillfully told tale of the after-emotions of 9/11 and the internal conflicts experienced by U.S. personnel in the hunt for bin Laden.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-61301-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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