Dark, creative visions worthy of the music that inspired them.
Twenty gritty stories riff on Bruce Springsteen’s song about a small-town hustler.
“Meeting Across the River,” from the Born to Run album (celebrating its 30th anniversary this year), begins: “Hey, Eddie, can you lend me a few bucks / And tonight can you get us a ride . . . . ” The song’s narrator is planning a last-chance hustle across the river so he can make some quick bucks and get back in good with his girl, Cherry, who’s sore that he took her radio and hocked it. The stories here, most written by seasoned mystery and thriller authors who are also devotees of the Boss, offer tangled reconfigurations of similar criminal intrigues. Taking their cue from the song’s film-noir tone, they feature lots of action in bars and stakeouts in cars. Naturally, many occur in New Jersey and New York City, but some transport us to such non-Springsteen locales as St. Paul, Minn. (William Kent Krueger’s “The Far Side of the River”), Montana (C.J. Box’s “Pirates of Yellowstone”), San Francisco (David Corbett’s “Bobby the Prop Buys In”), and Tecate, Mexico (Philip Reed’s “Claustrophobia”). In “Killing Time by the River Styx,” Peter David’s characters are already dead-by-shootout and waiting to be ferried across to Hades by Charon. Time has not been good to these characters; in many of the stories the narrator and Eddie meet again years after the betrayal of their friendship. (“And if we blow this one,” goes the song, “They ain’t gonna be looking for just me this time.”) Eddie is finishing a 25-year prison term in Randy Michael Signor’s “Crossing Over” when he spots the friend he took the rap for pumping weights in the yard. Two authors let the angry girlfriend tell her side of the story. In Pam Houston’s “Cherry Looks Back,” she bemoans her rotten taste in men. “The Other Side” by Aimee Liu remakes her into a published author named Cherie who recognizes her old flame at a book signing.
Dark, creative visions worthy of the music that inspired them.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-283-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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