An old soldier returns to West Point to find even more trouble than he—d left behind in this up-to-the-minute sequel to Dress Gray (1979). When Cadet Ry Slaight exposed the murder and cover-up of a gay classmate at West Point in 1969, he very nearly brought down the Academy and seemed to have destroyed his Army career. But time has a strange way of writing straight with crooked lines, and 30 years later Slaight finds himself back at the Point—as Superintendent. During his first few days in command, he observes jarring changes in military life—not the least of which is the presence of his daughter Jacey in the Corps of Cadets. But his idyll is short-lived: during parade exercises marking the start of the academic year, a cadet drops dead under mysterious circumstances, prompting an official inquiry and the attention of Washington and the national press. In the entire history of West Point, no one has ever died during parade exercises, and the fact that the unfortunate cadet was female is all that some minds need to confirm their suspicions that the Academy’s going to hell in a handbasket. A preliminary autopsy reveals that the young woman had had sex with at least three different men the day before she died, and when evidence begins to point toward members of the powerful Honor Committee, the stonewalling begins in earnest. How can Superintendent Slaight get to the bottom of things when half his officers despise him and most of the cadets seem scared to open their mouths? Through his daughter, that’s how. But this puts Jacey on the line, and soon enough Slaight worries that she—ll end up as the second casualty. Throw in an untrustworthy senator, a secret society, the unhappy mistress of someone important, and a big-shot cadet torn between his love for Jacey and his loyalty to his comrades . . . . Good suspense without much originality. Military buffs will love the detail and not care about the plot. Civilians, though, may feel a bit let down.
Pub Date: July 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15993-1
Page Count: 383
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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