One (many, actually) of the world’s great stories, in immensely attractive and reader-friendly form. Essential reading.
Western readers should welcome this “huge panorama of conflict and epic adventure,” announced as the fullest prose translation yet of the 11th-century national epic of Persia (now Iran).
Written over a span of 35 years by the accomplished poet Ferdowsi, it’s a lavish tale based on earlier oral epics and a royally commissioned national history, composed in some 60,000 couplets (which compare roughly with 100,000 lines of English verse). The book begins as a conflation of indigenous myths and legends, then traces several centuries’ worth of royal reigns (hence its subtitle), and concludes following the seventh-century Arab invasion of Persia that toppled the long-lived Sasanian dynasty and irreversibly altered a proud ancient culture. The poem is thus simultaneously a chronicle of kingship (which includes very pointed references to monarchs’ responsibilities to their subjects); a saga of complex relations between rulers and the military men who serve (and, sometimes, oppose) them; and a vast succession of stories of power struggles and portraits of heroes and villains, humans and supernatural foes, and families and regimes divided. Its choicest contents include: the tale of introverted Kay Khosrow’s troubled reign and eventual abdication; the adventures of Seyavash (a kind of Persian Marco Polo); the mixed morality deployed by royal consort Shirin (a classic survivor, against formidable odds); the story of Iraj, which partially echoes that of Old Testament hero Joseph; the conquests, and eventual death, of the invader Sekandar (i.e., Alexander the Great); and the richly detailed history of soldier-hero Rustum (known to us through Matthew Arnold’s narrative poem “Sohrab and Rustum”). The latter is a true tragic hero (his “Seven Trials” closely parallel the Labors of Hercules), and the stories in which he is central achieve thrilling intensity and resonance.
One (many, actually) of the world’s great stories, in immensely attractive and reader-friendly form. Essential reading.Pub Date: March 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03485-1
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...
When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.
Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.
Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14861-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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