An exhaustive history of the Red Knight solo air show.
The titular aerobatics demonstration program began in 1958, the result of a propitious combination of historical variables. Just after World War II, the Royal Canadian Air Force was eager to show off its jet fighters and display its combat readiness to Canadian citizens and the world at large. Two significant anniversaries were fast approaching, furnishing the program with celebratory reasons to showcase its skills: the 50th anniversary of the first time that a Canadian flew a powered aircraft (1909) and the 35th anniversary of the RCAF itself (1924). Debut author Corrigan devoted a quarter-century to researching and writing this history, which charts with painstaking meticulousness the full 12 years of the program’s operation. The jet that it used was the Canadair T-33A, which was eventually painted with Day-Glo red paint to increase its visibility and help avoid collisions, which led a photographer to give it the moniker “Red Knight.” The show became increasingly popular; tens of thousands of spectators could attend a single demonstration, and it expanded to include additional planes and a tour of the United States. Although largely billed as entertainment, the low-altitude precision flying was extremely dangerous as well as physically grueling for the men in the cockpits—on three occasions, pilots died. Lt. Brian Alston was the last, and his accident in 1969 was the principal reason that the show was finally retired. Despite its brevity, this is a mesmerizingly detailed history—a fact that’s impressive and exasperating at the same time. Corrigan buries the reader under minutiae, which sometimes makes the book as a whole seem more like an encyclopedic reference work than a remembrance to be consumed all at once. However, his diligence will reward the truly interested reader, and his diagrams and illustrations are helpful, descriptive tools. Also, the author ably highlights the extraordinary physical demands that the flight missions made on the pilots; the centrifugal force of some of the more daring maneuvers was punishing, indeed.
It’s hard to imagine a more comprehensive look at the Red Knight program—and at aerobatics in general.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5255-1536-1
Page Count: 386
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Debut novel by hip-hop rap artist Sister Souljah, whose No Disrespect (1994), which mixes sexual history with political diatribe, is popular in schools country-wide. In its way, this is a tour de force of black English and underworld slang, as finely tuned to its heroine’s voice as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The subject matter, though, has a certain flashiness, like a black Godfather family saga, and the heroine’s eventual fall develops only glancingly from her character. Born to a 14-year-old mother during one of New York’s worst snowstorms, Winter Santiaga is the teenaged daughter of Ricky Santiaga, Brooklyn’s top drug dealer, who lives like an Arab prince and treats his wife and four daughters like a queen and her princesses. Winter lost her virginity at 12 and now focuses unwaveringly on varieties of adolescent self-indulgence: sex and sugar-daddies, clothes, and getting her own way. She uses school only as a stepping-stone for getting out of the house—after all, nobody’s paying her to go there. But if there’s no money in it, why go? Meanwhile, Daddy decides it’s time to move out of Brooklyn to truly fancy digs on Long Island, though this places him in the discomfiting position of not being absolutely hands-on with his dealers; and sure enough the rise of some young Turks leads to his arrest. Then he does something really stupid: he murders his wife’s two weak brothers in jail with him on Riker’s Island and gets two consecutive life sentences. Winter’s then on her own, especially with Bullet, who may have replaced her dad as top hood, though when she selfishly fails to help her pregnant buddy Simone, there’s worse—much worse—to come. Thinness aside: riveting stuff, with language so frank it curls your hair. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02578-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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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