A grandly staged but unfocused thriller.
Nuclear explosions in New York and Washington inspire a charismatic general to launch the 10th crusade against the Islamic world in this turbulent debut military thriller.
A U.S. ambassador learns that a massive nuclear terrorist attack was carried out with the assent and likely participation of Pakistani military leaders. In response, U.S. Army Gen. Michael Scofield leaks to the press his intention to attack the Saudi Arabian cities of Mecca and Jeddah with his “Templar Division.” The news inflames governments across the globe, just as Scofield had hoped. American hard-liners warn that an assault on Islam’s holiest sites with only 10,000 soldiers would be futile and argue instead for thermonuclear obliteration of the Arab world. Progressive politicians, meanwhile, want the rogue general reined in until governors and surviving congressmen appoint a new president of the United States. What neither side knows is that Scofield has an arsenal of incredible nanotechnologies which, when deployed, will render his troops, ships and planes all but invincible—and invisible. But why would Scofield, who’s known as much for his cruelty as for his 27 Purple Hearts, want to avoid using nukes? The ostensible reason is that he wants to avoid “complaints from [the] neighbors”—countries downwind from the fallout. But the real driver appears to be his religious zealotry, which is fostered, at least in part, by his profound visions; in one, for example, the Archangel Michael warns Scofield—known as the “Lion of Afghanistan”—that the man who “calls forth [the] conflagration” is orchestrating actions that will cause the general to be “a destroyer of nations.” (At another point, Scofield says that while Christ preached love, Islam preaches world domination.) However, Gaddis gives Scofield too many needless disquisitions about God, and readers may find these digressions, as well as the relentless technobabble involving nanotechnology, distracting. These side trips, which also include a confusing political subplot, deflate the tension in what might have been a gripping tale. Nevertheless, the story’s forceful denouement of desperate warfare, and Scofield’s final engagement, fully justifies the book’s title.
A grandly staged but unfocused thriller.Pub Date: March 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0988579019
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Gaddis Laboratories, LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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