Ninth installment in the Dirk Pitt ocean-bottom salvage saga (Raise the Titanic, Cyclops, Treasure), with a dramatic upgrading in the writing. This time out, Cussler keeps a tight plot under a favoring wind and does not fill out his 416 pages with a surplus of subplots—though, to be sure, the story builds on Saturday-matinee cliffhangers and has the usual aircraft blueprints, as well as the Cussler clangor of underwater hardware, for bolting down fantasy. (A character barely picks up a telephone without our getting its specs, including holographics—we're into 1993—and distant speakers facing each other in 3-D.) The story: In 1945, a third plane carrying an atomic bomb to Japan is shot down and sinks off a Japanese island. The waterproof bomb lies down there for 50 years. In 1993, Dirk Pitt mines the sea-bottom with a colossal submersible tractor near the lost plane when a huge Japanese automobile-carrying cargo ship miles above him blows up, destroying two other ships nearby. It seems that a secret Japanese crime cartel, set on raising Japan to world trade dominance starting with a takeover of the US, has been making A-bombs. Lacking missiles, the cartel smuggles its small A-bombs in Japanese automobiles into various US cities and is now ready to blackmail the President for their big takeover. The cartel works out of Dragon Center, the island near where the US A-bomb sank. Dirk Pitt, now drawn into a US secret agency for locating the Japanese bombs (the cartel explodes one bomb in Wyoming for demonstration purposes), is given a new submersible tractor, since his last was destroyed in the accidental A-bomb explosion of the automobile cargo ship, and is sent down to blow up the US bomb in the sunken bomber, thus causing an earthquake and tsunami that will wipe out Dragon Center. Naturally, blowing up an A-bomb poses some threat to Dirk's life—but he does it, and his submersible sinks under a tremendous mudslide into a huge trench. Next we are reading deathproof Dirk's obit. Can he really be. . .? More surpassingly improbable than Indiana Jones, but much fun, crisply told, with exciting special effects. By now, Cussler has spent nearly 5,000 pages mucking around in oceanic blackness. Obsessive?
Pub Date: June 4, 1990
ISBN: 1416537805
Page Count: 609
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1990
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
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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