An engaging novel that offers equal amounts of current events, politics, romance and suspense.
A political novel that explores a complicated war with great care and sensitivity.
This debut novel explores the terror and xenophobia of the 9/11 attacks from an unusual angle. In the wake of that disaster, a complicated relationship emerges between Pakistan and the United States: Americans suddenly become wary of Pakistanis, more and more terrorist attacks occur in Pakistan, and the terrorist threat to America’s safety grows. Amid this drama, confusion and fear, three brave people are determined to help resolve the ongoing issues. CIA Special Agent Samantha Albright, whose mother would like to see her settle down and have children, has been placed in Islamabad, where she sees a whole other side to the foreign conflict and also falls in love. Meanwhile, Pakistani Lt. Col. Dhilawar Jahangiri, a devoted husband and father battling the terrorist forces in Afghanistan, unexpectedly becomes a victim when he and his wife are wounded. At the same time, Baaz Jan, a military leader in Pakistan, struggles with the idea that terrorists have wrongfully occupied his land and feels that they must be stopped. As these three fighters grapple with the wars surrounding them, they’re each forced to confront terrorism from new perspectives and draw new, enlightened conclusions about the complex dispute. This fast-paced, intriguing novel takes the often-misunderstood topic of terrorism and humanizes it. Each character effectively represents a particular viewpoint, and the unfolding story illustrates how difficult it is to simply navigate the war on terror, let alone determine who’s right and who’s wrong. This well-crafted composite of opinions and biases will help readers achieve a deeper, more empathetic understanding of Middle Eastern conflict.
An engaging novel that offers equal amounts of current events, politics, romance and suspense.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483679327
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
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
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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