Though its execution isn’t entirely successful, this slapstick political tale repeatedly hits a bull’s-eye.
In this debut farce, the U.S. president makes it his personal mission to take out his enemies in Iran and North Korea.
President Donald Trump’s post-golf good mood is quashed when he catches a news report of Ayatollah Sid insulting his mother. He gathers his “team”—Jared, Mike, and Don-Don—and takes Air Force One to Tehran. Tracking down Sid necessitates riding camels through the desert and stopping off at a hostel called Grandma’s House. But following a harrowing shootout, Trump opts for seeking help from private detective Shirley Holmes at 221B Bahka Street. Their collaboration a success, a victorious president then directs the team, including Shirley, to his next target: North Korean leader Yung Cur-Mud-Geon. They’re once again caught up in ludicrous but undeniably dangerous circumstances, but they make it home with nearly everyone intact. Unluckily, Trump faces betrayal back at the White House, where it seems someone is trying to oust him from the Oval Office. He’s suddenly up against an impeachment trial, where there’s fairly damning evidence of his illicit deeds. Trump has already identified the traitor, and with his presidency now at risk, he has revenge on the mind—and the audacity to mete it out. Roche’s goofy novella is rife with absurdity. Much of it is genuinely funny, like a rather odd jumble of movie references, from Casablanca to Weekend at Bernie’s. The satire is generally broad but hard-hitting, especially the president’s sexual antics (Mike braves Trump’s wandering hands at a Holiday Inn). It’s likewise telling that the smartest character in the book is a woman, Shirley, who, in an intriguing turn, is surprisingly vicious. The bare-bones prose suits the quick tempo but occasionally shortchanges the story; more specifics, for example, on the six guns Trump is prone to brandishing could have significantly amped the hilarity. At the same time, the author’s stick-figure Trump illustrations that accompany each chapter are mildly amusing but ultimately dispensable.
Though its execution isn’t entirely successful, this slapstick political tale repeatedly hits a bull’s-eye.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4575-6003-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2018
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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