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
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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