If you enjoy multiplayer shooting games and know or want to learn more about weapons systems, this book is for you.
Capitalizing on the success of the memoir Wasdin wrote with Stephen Templin, Seal Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy Seal Sniper (2011), the pair returns with a cartoonish novel.
Alexander “Alex” Brandenburg, John Landry, Catherine “Cat” Fares and Francisco “Pancho” Rodriguez are screw-ups. But screw-up is just another word for nothing left to lose. A supersecret program recruits this motley multiethnic crew to kill a group of terrorists engaged in a protracted battle to lead al Qaeda. The plot, a vehicle with one gear and no steering wheel, takes them back and forth from their base in Dam Neck, Va., to Jakarta, Zermatt, Beirut, Karachi, Islamabad, Paris and New York. Alex is team leader, and we glimpse his past, learn why he entered the service, hear his struggles and deepest thoughts: “When he was on land, he wanted to be at sea, and when he was at sea, he wanted to be on land. They were both his home, yet there were times when neither felt like his home.” While the comic book artist exaggerates anatomy, here the weapons and hardware are described in fetishistic detail—you might take them for product placements. The Outcasts visit elegant strip clubs and stay in the finest hotels, making love when not making war. And though they are meant to appear sympathetic, they return, as if for relaxation, to the blood Jacuzzi. The Outcasts, masters of covert operations—they are alone and allegedly disposable—engage in multiple firefights in major cities, killing dozens. In one instance, if you bother to count, you will find that two SUVs disgorge, like clown cars in a circus, at least 21 terrorists.
If you enjoy multiplayer shooting games and know or want to learn more about weapons systems, this book is for you.Pub Date: May 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7566-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.
Passion, friendship, heartbreak, and forgiveness ring true in Lovering's debut, the tale of a young woman's obsession with a man who's "good at being charming."
Long Island native Lucy Albright, starts her freshman year at Baird College in Southern California, intending to study English and journalism and become a travel writer. Stephen DeMarco, an upperclassman, is a political science major who plans to become a lawyer. Soon after they meet, Lucy tells Stephen an intensely personal story about the Unforgivable Thing, a betrayal that turned Lucy against her mother. Stephen pretends to listen to Lucy's painful disclosure, but all his thoughts are about her exposed black bra strap and her nipples pressing against her thin cotton T-shirt. It doesn't take Lucy long to realize Stephen's a "manipulative jerk" and she is "beyond pathetic" in her desire for him, but their lives are now intertwined. Their story takes seven years to unfold, but it's a fast-paced ride through hookups, breakups, and infidelities fueled by alcohol and cocaine and with oodles of sizzling sexual tension. "Lucy was an itch, a song stuck in your head or a movie you need to rewatch or a food you suddenly crave," Stephen says in one of his point-of-view chapters, which alternate with Lucy's. The ending is perfect, as Lucy figures out the dark secret Stephen has kept hidden and learns the difference between lustful addiction and mature love.
There are unforgettable beauties in this very sexy story.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6964-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Back to a Jurassic Park sideshow for another immensely entertaining adventure, this fashioned from the loose ends of Crichton's 1990 bestseller. Six years after the lethal rampage that closed the primordial zoo offshore Costa Rica, there are reports of strange beasts in widely separated Central American venues. Intrigued by the rumors, Richard Levine, a brilliant but arrogant paleontologist, goes in search of what he hopes will prove a lost world. Aided by state-of- the-art equipment, Levine finds a likely Costa Rican outpostbut quickly comes to grief, having disregarded the warnings of mathematician Ian Malcolm (the sequel's only holdover character). Malcolm and engineer Doc Thorne organize a rescue mission whose ranks include mechanical whiz Eddie Carr and Sarah Harding, a biologist doing fieldwork with predatory mammals in East Africa. The party of four is unexpectedly augmented by two children, Kelly Curtis, a 13-year-old "brainer," and Arby Benton, a black computer genius, age 11. Once on the coastal island, the deliverance crew soon links up with an unchastened Levine and locates the hush-hush genetics lab complex used to stock the ill- fated Jurassic Park with triceratops, tyrannosaurs, velociraptors, etc. Meanwhile, a mad amoral scientist and his own group, in pursuit of extinct creatures for biotech experiments, have also landed on the mysterious island. As it turns out, the prehistoric fauna is hostile to outsiders, and so the good guys as well as their malefic counterparts spend considerable time running through the triple-canopy jungle in justifiable terror. The far-from-dumb brutes exact a gruesomely heavy toll before the infinitely resourceful white-hat interlopers make their final breakout. Pell-mell action and hairbreadth escapes, plus periodic commentary on the uses and abuses of science: the admirable Crichton keeps the pot boiling throughout.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41946-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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