by Dan E. Ireland ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2014
A conspiracy-filled thriller that works by hinging on the family’s struggle for answers and by not providing the easy ones.
An American soldier’s death during a mission in Afghanistan seems to be part of a government conspiracy in Ireland’s debut military thriller inspired by the life of Pat Tillman.
Matt Crystal left behind his new wife, Melissa, and a promising NFL career so he could join the military, but his time is cut short when he’s killed by friendly fire from his own platoon. Fellow soldier John Ryan delivers a coded message to Matt’s high school football coach and mentor, Bob Heller, which Bob interprets as a call to investigate the death. After John goes AWOL, Bob starts to suspect that the military-industrial complex is orchestrating a coverup of a tragic accident or, even worse, Matt’s murder. The author deftly handles the story’s conspiracy angle; in addition to a cryptic message from Matt (relayed by John), Bob learns that Matt was vociferously opposed to the war in Iraq and that he befriended an Afghan Military Forces soldier who was also killed. Matt also kept notebooks—possibly with incriminating evidence—one of which mysteriously disappeared. Ireland smartly provides a perspective from Bob, as well as Matt’s family. With no clear-cut villain, readers might, like Coach Bob and the family, view organizations, namely the government and MIC, as villainous. For instance, Lt. Col. Coffee, who stonewalls the family’s questions with vague responses, is more a representative of government than an individual. There’s a great deal of back story to coincide with the main plot, including Bob’s divorce and Matt’s aspirations to play football as a high school freshman, but some of the stories feel like tangents: Matt’s uncle Ronnie, psychologically tormented by a corporal who heads PsyOps in Vietnam, has very little to do with the botched Afghanistan mission. And there are numerous character names and plot points to recall as Bob and others continue to look into Matt’s death. Ireland nevertheless excels at keeping the various plot elements in line, with helpful touches such as Matt’s mom, Jenny, explicitly listing “at least eight issues” that she wants clarified (like the drone that troops claimed to have heard soon after her son was killed). But Ireland does lose track of a few of the names: Matt is inaccurately called Pat several times, and his brother, Vince, is occasionally referred to as Kevin.
A conspiracy-filled thriller that works by hinging on the family’s struggle for answers and by not providing the easy ones.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493159901
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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