The women are matronly babes, everybody says “swell” with a straight face, and the skullduggery is hokey. But, jeepers, it’s...
America’s new top-secret antiaircraft fuse is at the heart of the action in the latest installment of a WWII naval saga (A Code for Tomorrow, 1999, etc.).
Gobbell continues the adventures of refreshingly human Annapolis grad Lieutenant Commander Todd Ingram, still on the destroyer Howell and in the thick of South Pacific shootups. The Howell’s skipper, Jerry Landa, is a hard-charging Brooklynite whose little MIT-grad brother Josh is at work on one of the Navy’s newest weapons, a wee radar-brained antiaircraft shell that will detonate when it nears its target—seemingly a great improvement on the current ammo, though Josh has secretly warned Jerry not to use the shells if they come his way. Which they do. As do the Japanese, who blast the Howell and cause the crew to abandon ship. Word gets out that Landa might have saved the craft if he hadn’t listened to Josh. An enraged Ingram takes a poke at his commanding officer and returns to Long Beach to pick up a new command and dally a bit with Mrs. Ingram—except that she’s been mysteriously whisked off to Africa, even though she holds secrets too hot to let her go anywhere near enemy lines. Somebody’s been messing with the Ingrams’ lives, but they don’t yet realize it. Just as he’s assuming command of a new destroyer, that ship gets shot out from under him too. Good thing he doesn’t know that Frank Ashton, the evil director of the fuse program, has set machinery in motion to have him neutralized. Fuses, a government assassin, the great Admiral Yamamoto, some cowboys in those PT boats Jack Kennedy used to drive, and the good guys from the Howell all come together off Guadalcanal to sort things out in some agreeably tense action.
The women are matronly babes, everybody says “swell” with a straight face, and the skullduggery is hokey. But, jeepers, it’s the ’40s. And the seagoing stuff is dead-on.Pub Date: March 21, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-27491-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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