Well up to Poyer’s excellent standards. No bluster, no dazzle, just real naval engagements that we may well see before long.
American observers sail into the thick of a vicious naval confrontation between the two Koreas.
Naval expert Poyer (The Threat, 2006, etc.) has already sent his hero Dan Lenson through nine realistic and frightening naval crises. They are always plausible situations, often in remote spots that are overshadowed by whatever big trouble the United States is in at the moment. This time the Medal of Honor–winner has been reassigned from his White House post to what appears to be lousy duty in the Western Pacific. Denied the command post he richly deserves, Commander Lenson is part of a team running joint U.S. and Korean Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) exercises in the waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan. Straight shooter that he is, Lenson throws himself totally into the job, coming quickly to respect the seamanship and dedication of the South Korean naval officers. Within a short time, he learns that the threat from North Korea is no joke. The weird totalitarians under their Dear Leader have been sending suicidal submarine crews to make mischief in southern waters even as the United States is secretly preparing to drastically reduce its forces in the area. On a break in Seoul, he participates in one of the spooky evacuation drills the Republic finds it necessary to run regularly to be ready for what they believe is an inevitable invasion from the North. Back at sea he rides out a typhoon and helps the Korean Commodore cope with the withdrawal of the Australian and American ships from the exercise. He has his own problem coping with the chain-smoking Koreans and the constipating shipboard diet. Then the ASW exercise becomes the real thing. Four of Kim Jong-Il’s subs and a second typhoon move into the area with murderous intent, and atomic radiation has been detected.
Well up to Poyer’s excellent standards. No bluster, no dazzle, just real naval engagements that we may well see before long.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36049-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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