uncompromisingly suspenseful tale of heroic adventure. ($150,000 ad/promo; radio satellite tour)
Another penetrating dissection of the passion and terror of warfare from the modern master of life-under-combat, this time
on a snowbound Slovakia, where a mixed bag of US Army infantry, acting as NATO peacekeepers, cope with murderous "ethnic cleansers"—and a far more threatening conflict between commanding officers. After examining battlefield bravado in American history, Coyle goes back to the near future, picking up the adventures of Army Lt. Nathan Dixon, son of his series hero Scott Dixon (Code of Honor, 1994, etc.). Nathan's cushy job as a battalion staff officer, is interrupted when he’s ordered to accompany a platoon led by greenhorn Lt. Gerald Reider on what is supposed to be a routine ’show of force" mission. Sparks fly long before the two lieutenants leave their battalion base: The product of the Virginia Military Institute and his father's hard-won wisdom, Dixon is put off by Reider, an elitist martinet fresh out of West Point. Meanwhile, Reider views Dixon's presence as a meddlesome imposition on his command. The two are barely speaking as their platoon trudges off into Slovakian hills to rendezvous with a trio of American tanks 25 kilometers away. Their orders are ambiguous: protect civilians, don't start any conflicts, be prepared to return fire if fired on. Coyle uses the escalating squabbles between the two men to illustrate contrasting styles of leadership, delivering intricate if long-winded asides about how crucial a commander's slightest twitch can be in maintaining control. Reider makes several mistakes, barely escaping calamity. When Dixon finds the burning hulk of a US tank, and can't contact the base on the platoon radio, he concludes that war has finally broken out. The platoon is then torn apart after a series of heartstopping, brutally realistic firefights, and the two officers, separated by hostile forces, must fight their way back any way they can. A grunt's life that, despite too many lectures on military mores, and a distracting romantic subplot, succeeds as an engrossing,
uncompromisingly suspenseful tale of heroic adventure. ($150,000 ad/promo; radio satellite tour)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-86296-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
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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