A Navy man stumbles his way on board the USS Gays in the Military and comes away with an engaging, candid story about manhood, the ambiguities of rank, and individual conscience. Legal affairs officer Mark Palmer, idle in San Jose aboard the USS Modoc, is called to Captain Morgan Bennet’s office and presented with a letter alleging that petty officer Marion Lamm has committed a homosexual act. Bennet won’t have this sort of thing on his ship and demands an immediate court-martial. Though Palmer succeeds in lowering the charges, he’s also sure the claim is too flimsy to stand. But Palmer’s 16 years of service have put him up for a promotion that Captain Bennet can cancel as he likes, so the junior Palmer does as ordered. (Twenty-year Navy veteran Lane is clearly on familiar ground here.) None of this sits well with Lynn, Palmer’s lover and a former Navy wife, but Lynn is conflicted, too. Her ex-husband, the shadowy Tony, prevents her from getting on with her life by holding child-support payments for their daughter hostage. This doesn’t sit well with Palmer, who knows that his love for the mother and daughter is honest—unlike his enthusiasm for the case against Lamm. The trial, a deftly written, back-and-forth affair, pits Palmer against defense attorney Lt. Templemann. While Palmer never quite gives an opinion on gays in the military, he does know Lamm—persecuted by the sailors for busting up their on-board drug abuse—is innocent. Captain Bennet’s outrageous prejudice is never explored, but Palmer’s own romantic, gender, and career conflicts are fully and humanely elaborated. In resolving them, author Lane doesn’t take the easy out, and the conclusion seems probable if unexpected. An informed depiction of the “new” military, all told in Lane’s fluent voice.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-882593-29-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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