An absorbing all-business first novel about a Houston-based multinational (bearing more than a passing resemblance to COMPAQ and Dell Computer) under siege by a cyberage extortionist whose wry nom de guerre is Hektor. Barry Shepard, the number three man at Simtec (a high-tech enterprise headed by a woman), is mildly disturbed to discover that his company has been delivering wrongly configured PCs to a host of its mail-order customers. When he receives an unsigned letter asking for $1 million to halt the online incursions that are causing the costly problems, Barry immediately informs his superiors. But the mad hacker's timing is impeccable. Less than a year after the installation of marketing whiz Diane Hughes (who barely knows her ASCII from an ellipsis) as CEO, Simtec is still rent by internal strife and unable to mount an effective response to the threat. While the company dithers, Hektor (a.k.a. James Murphy Dupree, a manipulative genius) ups his financial demands to $5 million and intensifies the pressure, misprogramming production- line robots, erasing file servers, destroying backup tapes, and otherwise wreaking in-house havoc. Wall Street and the media catch wind of Simtec's woes, and Barry recruits professional help to join in the increasingly desperate effort to fight and find the blackmailer. The stakes and tension mount as the now mortal enemies stalk one another via the Internet. With a state-of-the-art assist from his independent contractors, Barry eventually succeeds in hunting down Dupree/Hektor and the corporate Judas who gave him an inside track at the embattled company, albeit not before he survives a terrifying crawl through a live-wired cabling duct that has already killed one would-be troubleshooter. An impressively suspenseful, user-friendly debut with appeal both for the barely computer literate and for their nerdy betters. On a scale of one to five, then, four bytes. ($25,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-671-00065-9
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997
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
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
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