A fresh re-examination of race in the military.
Prewitt’s (Snake Walkers, 2005) mystery confronts the wages of both war and racial conflict.
Anthony Andrews, a black reporter for the Washington Post in 1969, is tasked with finding positive depictions of the black soldier’s experience in Vietnam, what his editor calls “hero stories.” Andrews is embedded in an active, combat-ready unit and given an eye-opening taste of the horrors of war. He sees seven black soldiers return from some nebulous mission shrouded in mystery. Andrews learns that those seven—originally 15—are returning from a harrowing experience no one seems anxious to discuss. He also discovers that their alleged mission was more like penance for what may have been a riot, uprising, or some kind of brawling melee that involved more than 40 black soldiers angry at their white superiors for mistreatment. After two months investigating the story and hitting a dead end, Andrews returns stateside, haunted by the trauma of his violent experience. Andrews’ angry and disillusioned wife eventually leaves him, and his once-peaceful life starts to unravel. He finally receives an unsolicited phone call that potentially promises to move him closer to the truth about his stonewalled case. This is a nuanced exploration of the racial tensions that express themselves within the pressurized context of war. Prewitt does a fine job allowing those tensions to reveal themselves through the characters rather than through authorial proselytizing. Some of the plot development, though, seems needlessly compressed and, as a result, melodramatic. Andrews is quick to fall apart after his first frightening experience in Vietnam, just as his wife is inexplicably ready to leave him with their young child after a few weeks of arguments over domestic banalities. Also, some narrative anomalies are more distracting than gripping: one soldier, nicknamed Professor, aids his comrades with his psychic abilities. As a whole, however, this is an intelligently crafted tale, brimming with both suspense and social commentary.
A fresh re-examination of race in the military.Pub Date: July 30, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying...
King (Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations.
Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn’t Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here (“For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy”), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom—don’t ask why there—and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: “I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.” A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed—or maybe not. King’s vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been—that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we’re all actually living. “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to,” warns King in an afterword, “look at the Zapruder film.”
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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