Why would Bruce Willis snap this up for a million dollars? Because it feels safely familiar, with a wild hook added by Huggins, author of three action thrillers (Leviathan, etc., not reviewed) for the Christian market. Army scientist Dr. Maggie Milton (Milton, as in Paradise Lost) has created a Frankenstein supersoldier. She's taken the body of a dead soldier, named Cain, who had highly unusual genes (XYY), altered them, rebuilt him with titanium armor, and primed him with all manner of super devices, including nearly instant self-healing flesh in case of wounds, and fangs for chewing up enemy bodies to replenish his lowered RNA. Unfortunately, to do all of this she's had to inject him with a mutated strain of Marburg virus, the deadliest virus known, which, if released, could wipe out all life on Earth within weeks. What the Army doesn't know is that Satan has in fact entered their supersoldier, endowing him with a galactic hunger for evil and apocalyptic plans of his own—and suddenly he's on the loose, with his super speed and his ability to rip through steel like paper! Who can stop him? Well, polymathic Marine Colonel James L. Soloman might be able to. Retired since the death of his wife and daughter (for which he blames himself), he's kept himself in almost superhuman Spartan condition at his home in Death Valley. Soloman, recruited to cancel out Cain quietly, tries a variety of lethal gambits to stop him, but none of them work. Cain, it turns out, is actually seeking Maggie's daughter Amy, intending to make a human sacrifice of her before unleashing the Marburg virus on mankind. Eventually, Soloman, whose plans go awry, loses the help of the intelligence forces. Cain/Satan survives all the ordnance used against him, rants in biblical fustian, and prepares Amy for his great black mass as time runs out for the human race. Staggering, galactically gruesome comic-strip, a natural for bouncing Bruce.
Pub Date: July 7, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83403-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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