by James W. Huston ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2000
A thinking man's military thriller, with superb action, crackling hardware-speak, and just enough tragedy to emphasize the...
Huston's third military thriller is also his best as it examines the cost of another hypothetical American reprisal against terrorism, this time with a supersonic fighter-jet pursuit of a bin Laden stand-in to his secret desert fortress.
In what is probably the only thriller series based on a passage of the US Constitution, Huston, a former Navy F-14 flyboy now practicing law, typically has some plucky legal type—here it's a Navy JAG officer aboard an aircraft carrier off the Israeli coast—discover Article 1, Section 8, which gives Congress the legal clout to determine how force should be applied when American interests are threatened abroad. Huston used Section 8 both in his excellent debut (Balance of Power, 1998) and its much less powerful sequel (The Price of Power, 1999); now he employs it to have Congress declare war on a single person, Sheik al-Jabar, who has apparently revived an 11th-century Islamic sect of assassins to commit mayhem against Israel and the US. When one of al-Jabar's attacks against Israel kills a Navy pilot seeking quality time with the beautiful Israeli mystery woman he wants to marry, the pilot's best buddy, Lieutenant Sean Woods, whose father died in a terrorist attack, wants revenge. After discussing his feelings with the carrier's JAG officer, and getting some tips about St. Aquinas's definition of a just war from the ship's chaplain, Woods writes his congressman and, miraculously, gets results. Of course, killing al-Jabar, who hides in ancient fortresses protected by Syria and Iran, will not be easy. While Woods flies spectacular aerial dogfights over Lebanon and Iran, Sami al-Hadad, the NSA's top Arab intelligence analyst, finds evidence that Israel may be using al-Jabar to force the US to declare a war that can't be won.
A thinking man's military thriller, with superb action, crackling hardware-speak, and just enough tragedy to emphasize the emotional price for so much gung-ho American heroism.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-17201-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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