A wide-ranging and argument-heavy (albeit, rigged for the prosecution) novel dramatizing the tenets of Christian apologetics.
Two men trapped by a storm have a long conversation about humanity, life, and faith.
Walton’s fiction debut has as its main setting an airport in the grip of a massive ice storm. All flights have been canceled, and as the storm intensifies, all ground traffic in and out of the airport is temporarily cut off, trapping everybody inside. Among those stranded in the terminal is Dan Lucas, an ex-military man and security contractor on the verge of retirement. At the airport, he encounters tenured sociology professor Ben Chernick and strikes up a conversation that quickly drifts to a favorite subject of Dan’s (indeed, the topic of the book he hopes to write in his retirement): the irrefutable proof of the existence of the Christian God and the Christian afterlife. Ben is skeptical, and at first Dan respects this, thinking, “I’m not in the mood to spar with some left-wing academic tonight.” But he quickly warms to the subject, and in Walton’s handling, he unfolds what he considers to be the case for Christianity—not, as he puts it, “sensational tabloid junk,” but rather the truth that’s being suppressed by mainstream scientists and academics, except for a small but growing group of brave outliers. Ben fails to understand how Dan could “buy into the Bible myth,” but Dan bombards him with a fairly standard litany of creationist talking points: alleged mysteries of the so-called Cambrian explosion, the contention that Darwinian evolution is “a philosophical theory and nothing more,” the idea of “irreducible complexity,” the Shroud of Turin, and the anecdotes of “near-death experiences,” which Dan characterizes as “eyewitness testimony of people who have passed into a supernatural realm.” Walton braids in a couple of minor subplots, but the main attraction of this well-constructed and compulsively readable book remains the very effectively rendered grand debate at its center, which should appeal to—and infuriate—religious and secular readers in equal measure. The back-and-forth between Dan and Ben is smoothly, convincingly done, even if its end result isn’t really ever in doubt.
A wide-ranging and argument-heavy (albeit, rigged for the prosecution) novel dramatizing the tenets of Christian apologetics.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9974334-0-1
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Sunbrook Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2016
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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