More farfetched doings for Dirk Pitt, director of special projects at the National Underwater and Marine Agency—starting, circa 1989, when people start dropping horribly dead in Alaskan waters: somehow, it seems, ultrasecret Nerve Agent S has been leaking into the sea up there! ("One teaspoon will kill every living organism in four million gallons of seawater.") So Dirk and his crew head north and manage to find the source of the killer-pollution in a sunken ship. But how did the poison (stolen from a US Army dumping ground in Nevada) wind up on that ship? And why do clues aboard the sunken vessel connect to other lost mystery-ships? Those are the puzzles for Dirk, who, ignited by the Nerve Agent death of colleague Julie Mendoza (her protective suit got torn during a volcano), determines to track down the villains behind it all. But meanwhile those villains—a Fu Manchu-ish corporation headed by an aged Dragon Lady—are up to even more diabolical schemes. In cahoots with the USSR, you see, the evil Orientals have arranged for the US Prez and VP to be abducted from the Presidential yacht in the Potomac! Why? So that the Russians can give the Prez a super-brainwashing—just your basic injection of RNA into the hippocampus, plus a nifty brain implant. Before the President suddenly reappears, however, claiming to have been engaged in a super-summit meeting, Dirk has again been called into emergency action: he locates the sunken yacht, figuring out how the magical abduction was arranged. And after the thoroughly re-brained Prez behaves so weirdly that he gets impeached, there'll be still another major mission for Cussler's indefatigable hero: Dirk must find and rescue the still-missing VP before slimy Speaker of the House Alan Moran (a tool of the Oriental conspiracy) takes over the White House. The villains repeatedly try to kill Dirk; congresswoman Loren, Dirk's love, gets abducted when she tries to lend a hand; the bad guys fight among themselves; nautical, explosive rescues and showdowns proliferate. In short: more of the same from unpretentious, hard-working actioneer Cussler—with faceless characters, loopy plotting, solid techno-detail, and (this time) more than a glimmer of Yellow Peril racism.
Pub Date: May 21, 1984
ISBN: 1416516859
Page Count: 545
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1984
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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