Clavell's fifth novel in his Asian saga (King Rat, Tai-Pan, Shogun, Noble House) is a 1,216-page superblockbuster adventure story set in revolutionary Iran, between February 9 and March 4, 1979, long before the hostage crisis but with Shah Pahlavi just having left the country and Khomeini waiting in the wings. Scot Gavallan, son of the chairman and managing director of S-G, a Britishrun helicopter company servicing the government-owned oil fields in Iran, has his hands full trying to keep his fleet operational. Guerney Aviation, the American helicopter outfit, has pulled out of Iran, to cut its foreseeable upcoming losses. S-G's operations have doubled with the American pullout, but its corporate headquarters in Hong Kong (where S-G is secretly owned by the vast Noble House conglomerate run by Linbar Struan) also sees a British pullout ahead, since the fanatical revolutionaries will undoubtedly nationalize the fleet and bring financial ruin to S-G. Can Scot get his big international team and their choppers safely out of Iran? In the whirlwind wrath of God upon the infidels in Iran, the rioting madness of political and religious mobs, and the blades of the whirlybirds seeking escape in Gavallan's Operation Whirlwind (by the birds being secretly dismantled and stripped via Jumbo jet freighter), the novel is well-titled. Among the blast of subplots are the tragic love of pilot Tom Lochart for the ravishing Muslim Sharazad, with their memorably explosive last kiss; the struggle of Andrew Gavallan, Scot's father, with Linbar for control of Noble House and a takeover by Scot; the story of the loving Azadeh and her pilot husband, the giant, knife-bearing Finn Erikki Yokkonen's resistence to KGB agent Fedor Rakoczy, and then, Rakoczy's own descent into horror. Aside from length, Whirlwind is an achievement, distinguishable from dozens of zippy page-turners this year by the density of its experience of modern, tortured Iran. Tremendous readership assured.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1986
ISBN: 0340766182
Page Count: 1248
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1986
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.
The renowned writer offers advice on information-gathering and nonfiction composition.
The book consists of eight instructive and charming essays about creating narratives, all of them originally composed for the New Yorker, where McPhee (Silk Parachute, 2010, etc.) has been a contributor since the mid-1960s. Reading them consecutively in one volume constitutes a master class in writing, as the author clearly demonstrates why he has taught so successfully part-time for decades at Princeton University. In one of the essays, McPhee focuses on the personalities and skills of editors and publishers for whom he has worked, and his descriptions of those men and women are insightful and delightful. The main personality throughout the collection, though, is McPhee himself. He is frequently self-deprecating, occasionally openly proud of his accomplishments, and never boring. In his magazine articles and the books resulting from them, McPhee rarely injects himself except superficially. Within these essays, he offers a departure by revealing quite a bit about his journalism, his teaching life, and daughters, two of whom write professionally. Throughout the collection, there emerge passages of sly, subtle humor, a quality often absent in McPhee’s lengthy magazine pieces. Since some subjects are so weighty—especially those dealing with geology—the writing can seem dry. There is no dry prose here, however. Almost every sentence sparkles, with wordplay evident throughout. Another bonus is the detailed explanation of how McPhee decided to tackle certain topics and then how he chose to structure the resulting pieces. Readers already familiar with the author’s masterpieces—e.g., Levels of the Game, Encounters with the Archdruid, Looking for a Ship, Uncommon Carriers, Oranges, and Coming into the Country—will feel especially fulfilled by McPhee’s discussions of the specifics from his many books.
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-14274-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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