A white-hot ingot of daring, disciplined storytelling that focuses on a dangerous military project.
A sci-fi thriller explores stolen technology and a hacktivist determined to guide humanity’s evolution.
This tale begins at a U.S. Air Force base in Afghanistan. Airman Donald Westlake, a recent convert to skinhead metal music, exits the barracks armed for combat. With violent lyrics screaming through his headphones, he begins shooting Afghani soldiers stationed at the base until he is killed by a fellow airman. Meanwhile, in Austin, Texas, hacktivist Tom Ayana orchestrates flash mob events from the “cyber command center” in his mother’s house. These incidents, which interrupt the lives of unsuspecting citizens in places like San Antonio’s Woodland Park, result in risqué demonstrations and a thrilling sense of connectedness among the participants. Under the digital guise of Swarm, Tom encounters the Meta Militia online and is chosen to play with—that is, augment—the zeph.r code, a stolen Department of Defense project designed to modify human behavior. While Tom and his best friend, a DJ named Xander Smith, combine their love of music, mobbing, and cosmic awareness to dominate the electronic dance music scene, Homeland Security agent Jake Duggan starts investigating Westlake’s death. Jake eventually recruits evolutionary biologist Dr. Cara Park—an expert on swarming insects—to help learn the deadly potential of zeph.r. In the latest book by Garcia (The Decline of Men, 2009, etc.), readers are treated to what might be written if the misanthropic author Chuck Palahniuk gave the free-wheeling Thomas Pynchon a blood transfusion. Garcia’s careening prose covers cutting-edge topics, like using mosquitoes to inoculate against malaria, while also espousing the work of “neo-patriots” like Anonymous, who “would save democracy by keeping it honest.” When Tom experiences the fabulously kinetic zeph.r, there’s “a rising, writhing tower of tessellating textures, each one separate yet fused to the others and seething, like a flame.” Though intellectually and politically supercharged, these elements never prevent the characters’ humanity from carrying the narrative. The ambiguous ending glories in the potential of life-altering technology in the hands of a forward-thinking society.
A white-hot ingot of daring, disciplined storytelling that focuses on a dangerous military project.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9974398-1-6
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Morphic Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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