A complex, heartfelt political thriller.
Fuller (Turkey and the Arab Spring, 2014, etc.) examines the precarious morality of interventionist American foreign policy in this political thriller.
A prologue at the start of this novel asks, “Treason....What does it actually mean? Is it a thought? A state of mind? An act?” What follows is a morality play that examines just those concerns. Alex Anders was raised in Lahore, Pakistan, where his missionary parents operated an eye clinic to cater to the poor and spread the Christian Gospel by setting a compassionate example for their Muslim neighbors. When Alex returns from college in America, he notices the tension that’s resulted from Pakistan’s increasing Islamization. The turmoil results in his parents’ clinic being burned down by a Muslim mob and his father being beaten to within an inch of his life in front of the blaze. The experience marks a shift in Alex’s worldview. When he returns to the U.S., his Russian studies at school lead to his recruitment into the CIA, and he becomes part of the “black loam of a netherworld out there where secret armies meet secret armies to perpetuate the struggle.” His work leads him to Augusto Pinochet’s Chile and eventually back to Pakistan, where the war on terror has supplanted the Cold War in America’s global chess game. Yet, as the years wear on and Alex witnesses tragedy after tragedy—some public, some personal—his views begin to shift, and he’s forced to justify the tactics of his government when they place him at odds with the well-being of his family and friends. Fuller has written a very atypical thriller: its pace is deliberate, its immersion in its settings is complete, and it takes an intense interest in the emotional havoc of events. Alex is not simply an agent on assignment; he’s a man working to fix a world of which he is very much a part. (At least, he hopes his work is helping to fix it.) “Treason” is the first word of this book, and readers should not be surprised by its conclusion, but the emotional depth that Fuller employs to reach the outcome makes it an achievement.
A complex, heartfelt political thriller.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0993751417
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Bozorg Press
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015
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
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
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