A deliciously inventive and historically astute political drama.
A historical novel dramatizes volatile disputes within the Kennedy administration over the Vietnam War.
In 1963, Vietnam is a political tinderbox for President John F. Kennedy. On the one hand, he wants to limit the number of American troops there, but on the other hand, a robust U.S. military presence is necessary to defeat a triumvirate of enemies: Chinese Communists, the Viet Cong, and the belligerent North Vietnamese. In addition, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, a Roman Catholic, insists on persecuting the Buddhist majority, who protest with increasing boldness. Nevertheless, the chief difficulty Kennedy seems to face in Vietnam arises from internecine conflicts within his own administration. A cabal of U.S. government groups, led by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and the CIA, works against Kennedy’s wishes in order to depose and potentially assassinate Diem. It’s into these tumultuous circumstances that U.S. Marine Maj. Steven Hebert is sent to Saigon, officially to function as the head of the embassy’s security and unofficially to keep tabs on Kennedy’s enemies in South Vietnam. Hebert encounters a relentless effort to remove Diem for nefarious reasons—Air Force Lt. Lucien Conein, a CIA operative, directs that mission partly to ensure the reinvigoration of the opium trade through French Corsican connections. Meanwhile, Thomas Warren, an FBI agent and a victim of an American program to experiment with LSD as an instrument of mind control, investigates Kennedy’s extramarital affairs. This first installment in Kesterson’s (The President’s Gold, 2013, etc.) Pawns series is astonishingly well-researched, the result of that rigor a vivid depiction of historical facts skillfully delivered within a fictional framework. The author is especially adept at explaining the fault lines within a frighteningly fractured presidential administration. Kesterson’s writing is clear and lively and more realistic than literary, which suits the subject matter. But the inner machinations of the American government were baroquely complex and ever shifting, and while the author does an admirable job imposing explanatory order on that chaos, those complications can become onerous to process. It would have been helpful to excise one of the numerous subplots. The one following the FBI’s surveillance of a potential presidential mistress didn’t require as much attention as it received.
A deliciously inventive and historically astute political drama.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9984707-2-6
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Amber Publishers Company
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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