Not for the squeamish, but skillful, often elegant prose compensates for a disturbing tale about an American mission in...
Cyrenaica—once part of the nation of Tripoli—becomes the setting for a historical novel detailing the brutal 1805 trek through the Sahara Desert during the U.S.’s first foreign military action.
King Yusuf Vartoonian of Tripoli (now Libya) has captured 300 American mariners and is holding them for ransom. When Yusuf has 10 of them beheaded, President Thomas Jefferson is under pressure to show that his government can protect its citizens. A deal is struck between the U.S. and Yusuf’s older brother Prince Ahmad, who is the rightful heir to the throne. If Yusuf is overthrown and Ahmad given financial incentives, the Americans will be released. And so, fictional 19-year-old Pvt. Lemuel Sweet, the earnest, intelligent central protagonist, finds himself with a small group of Marines and a collection of Egyptians, Greeks, Arabs, and assorted misfits of various nationalities trudging through the unforgiving terrain of the Sahara. Among the members of this disharmonious coalition is Gustav Ladendorf, a Swiss engineer and speaker of many languages. When the group’s Egyptian translator is found dead (with his body mutilated), Ladendorf steps into the role. The journey from Alexandria to Derna—to collect supporters of Ahmad—is marked by violence, death, and desperation, not to mention the presence of a diabolically sinister spirit (a djinn). As the march progresses, McCandless (Sour Lake, 2017, etc.) portrays Ladendorf as an increasingly enigmatic, malevolent character in this haunting, multilayered novel that explores the futility of war, good versus evil, and the dispiriting transformation of a man from youthful optimist to disillusioned soul. Told partly through present-tense, third-person narration and partly through Sweet’s lengthy, intermittent diary entries, this dark story with heavy supernatural overtones vividly depicts the heat, aridness, and mystery of the unending expanse of sand and emptiness that tortures body and mind. Here is Sweet describing the desert: “Great systems of Dunes have developed. They are restless creatures. They writhe and rear in the wind, constantly repositioning themselves, like sleepers troubled by Nightmares.”
Not for the squeamish, but skillful, often elegant prose compensates for a disturbing tale about an American mission in Africa.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-692-41572-6
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Ninth Planet
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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