A superhuman capable of extreme feats of speed and strength must escape the NSA and his demons.
Rage; the very word conjures a directed fury—animate, precise, irate. To the low-level criminals and hoodlums of Chicago, Rage is a very real person, distributing justice on the nighttime streets with extreme vengeance. One of these acts captures the attention of widowed Chicago police officer Larry Parker, but Rage disappears before Parker can speak with him. Several weeks later, it’s Parker’s extreme misfortune to run into the seemingly bionic vigilante a second time, and Parker is drawn into a web of murders, cover-ups and national security secrets for which his police department training could never have prepared him. A secret even to most in the intelligence community, Rage is a product of a government experiment to reprogram the human genome and create a being who can do the impossible—leap buildings, throw vehicles, knock down walls with a single punch. Now, almost 30 years after this experiment began, the government wants their test subjects back, and an elite SWAT team has been deployed to capture Rage—but little does he know that there are two others like him. One is rogue, living as an assassin for hire, and the other is a loyal solider of the federal government; it’s this second soldier whom Rage, Parker and their cohorts must defeat to keep their freedom. The action traverses much of the Eastern United States, and, all too often, much of the storyline; the book features numerous taut combat and chase sequences, but ultimately lacks emotional depth. Several scenes of dreamlike intimacy are attempted between Rage and his beautiful female acquaintance, but the interactions and dialogue feel contrived and one-dimensional. Similarly, Rage often wrestles with his conscience, pondering whether his numerous killings are borne out of justice or bloodlust, but these moments never go beyond the surface and the philosophical issue is never satisfactorily resolved. Comparisons to Robert Ludlum’s Bourne trilogy (and many superheroes in American popular culture, for that matter) are certainly warranted. Readers will find that those books offer deeper looks into the world of an alienated, weaponized human being. A sharp thriller in many aspects, but lacks the robustness and depth of many classics of the genre.
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-1257802630
Page Count: 309
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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