A diverting travelogue with some admirable writing but little arc or narrative theme beyond assorted recipes.
World traveler Idris Granger doesn’t cook well, but in Thomas’ collection of short stories, he collects recipes for different delicious dishes everywhere he goes.
Over the course of these 10 tales, Granger sees parts of the world that most people wouldn’t think of visiting. Each story is accompanied by a recipe Granger learned from one of the other characters, who range from the daughter of an Irish pub owner to a would-be kidnapper in Australia to Granger’s roommate in South Africa. The stories are either full of action or personal tension. For instance, working in a mining camp in Tasu, British Columbia, Granger discovers a cook who abuses his assistant, and the story centers around what the rest of the crew do about it. Granger leaves with a recipe for fish pie. He gets a recipe for seafood chowder from his friend Dan, a “fugitive recovery agent”—aka bounty hunter—in Italy. While hunting pigs in Australia, Granger and a boxing champion come across kidnappers, one of whom gets a lighter sentence for being coerced into his crime and for having a great recipe for lamb shanks. Tales like the latter strain credulity to the breaking point, and at times, the recipe element seems forced into the story for the sake of the theme. Only the most dedicated gourmand would accept that a kidnapper could cook meat well enough for it to factor into a legal judgment. Thomas does have an eye for description, though. His characters frequently feel real, and his settings capture danger and beauty, whether at a camp in Israel or in a sprawling countryside. What readers don’t get is any real sense of who Granger is, what he might believe or why food is so important to him. He’s an empty vessel, a stand-in for the reader, often a mere spectator. He simply drifts, leaving the settings and supporting characters to do the heavy lifting.
A diverting travelogue with some admirable writing but little arc or narrative theme beyond assorted recipes.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1477580301
Page Count: 324
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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