A master of unholy terror, Easterman (The Judas Testament, 1994, etc.) makes effective use of a fire-obsessed name-brand villain in a vast conspiracy thriller whose good guys are as vicious as their abominable adversaries. Dublin is hosting a secret conference of Muslim clerics preparing to bargain with European and US diplomats, and Ireland's prime minister puts Declan Carberry, one of Eire's top cops, in charge of the security detail. While Declan would rather be pursuing the killer of his only daughter (who was caught in crossfire of what appeared to be a reprisal raid by Ulster nationalists), he perks up considerably upon learning that Amina Bustani, a long-lost love from Lebanon, is also minding the ecclesiastics. Before deliberations can begin, however, a mysterious commando unit kidnaps the delegates to the preliminary parley. When the abductors make no immediate demands, it dawns on the authorities that they may be embroiled in something other than an Arab turf war. Declan soon determines that they are, but he's barred from the hunt because higher-ups—in league with Britain's MI5 and the CIA—are using the captives to ransom UK/US intelligence agents held hostage throughout the Middle East. As it happens, their chosen instrument, a red-neck messiah thought to have perished in Waco, Texas, has his own agenda, which he pursues from an island stronghold offshore from County Kerry. Hellbent on rescuing Amina (who was taken prisoner with her charges), Declan, with an assist from a lissome IRA lassie and a hit man sent to Ireland by Hizbollah, finally tracks down the fanatic fundamentalist before he blows his rocky redoubt and all on it to kingdom come. Utterly seductive twaddle that pits semi-complex protagonists against one another in dubious battles rooted in rule-or-ruin religious and secular hatreds.
Pub Date: May 24, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017742-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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
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
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