A briskly paced but wildly unrealistic political tale.
In this novel, mercenaries seize an American senator in the Colombian jungle—and his wounded bodyguard may be his only hope for survival.
Case McIntire has an unenviable job: providing personal security for Sen. Eugene Braithwaite as he traipses recklessly through a swath of Colombian jungle controlled by heavily armed FARC revolutionaries. Braithwaite’s convoy is attacked by a group of mercenaries led by Humberto Salazar Carillo, also known as El Presidente, a death-obsessed assassin who reads Plato and Descartes when he’s not killing people for money. Braithwaite is kidnapped and whisked away from a scene littered with dead security guards, but Case miraculously survives, though he’s badly wounded. He improvises a weapon out of the detritus of mangled steel left behind by the marauders, and sets out to find Braithwaite should he remain alive. Little does Case know that the senator’s kidnapping is a carefully orchestrated ruse—his closest adviser, the nihilistically amoral Neville Horvath, arranged it all in a bid to position Braithwaite for a presidential run. Horvath convinced the Escurela de Lanceros, something akin to a Special Forces unit, to participate in the abduction, which means the Colombian government is complicit, elevating the situation to the level of a catastrophic international incident. Meanwhile, the jungle reminds Case of his service during the Vietnam War and his mistaken execution of an innocent man, a recollection that torments him in his dreams. O’Keefe’s (Dixon’s Edge, 2015) plot is skillfully designed to deliver action and thrills, and there is never a lull in the story’s frenzied pace. But that fevered pitch is eventually so relentless, it becomes the authorial equivalent of shrill, overwrought, and hyperbolic. In addition, Horvath’s kidnapping scheme is insanely implausible. As for the prose, it inhabits a peculiar space between melodramatically over the top and bloodlessly anodyne. When Case steps on a shard of glass, he mumbles: “Jesus! Thank you, God! I really needed that! Damn!” In fact, it’s astonishing how often exclamations like “Damn!” and “Uh-oh!” occur. As a result, even the surfeit of action doesn’t compensate for the novel’s featureless writing.
A briskly paced but wildly unrealistic political tale.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-6546-4
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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