Apart from the title piece itself, this collection of McPhee articles from The New Yorker doesn't really deliver full value. The most interesting, for its subject, is "The Atlantic Generating Station," about a prospective nuclear-power plant floating on an immense hull off the coast of New Jersey; prospectively, too, a magnet and threat to sea life. One man's inspiration that mushroomed, the project (since shelved) enlists the range of McPhee's sympathies and skills, and his peerless knack for signification. Then there's a disarming, if slightly arch, "Talk of the Town" tidbit, "The Pinball Philosophy," about two preeminent players, the Times' Tom Buckley and Pulitzer journalist J. Anthony Lukas ("who, between tilts, does some freelance writing"); there's a characteristic McPhee sortie into the wilds, with a characteristically ill-sorted, well-suited lot of super-woodsmen. And there's the notorious story of "Otto" the pseudonymous chef at an unnamed, out-of-the-way country restaurant who reportedly served McPhee the "twenty or thirty" best meals of his life—and whom New York food writers zealously tracked down and found wanting. (Worse, the usually-meticulous New Yorker had to apologize for an unwarranted slur to four-star restaurant Lutece.) The piece reads like a parody, with its testimonials to the "educated, sensitive, intelligent," dedicated, publicity-shunning proprietors, its 50 pages of magisterals pronouncements on microscopic food topics: a sendup, in short, of the whole self-important food scene. But apparently McPhee means this as seriously as he means us to take, for instance, canoeist John's appraisal of the St. John River ("some flavor of the upper Androscoggin . . . more presence than the Penobscot . . . you have reminiscences of it in the Delaware . . ."). Happily, though, there's also "Giving Good Weight," about New York's flourishing new Greenmarkets—where local farmers, an endangered species, sell fresh produce to deprived cityfolk in a heady atmosphere of banter and beefs, blaring Panasonics and instant friendships that McPhee scripts like a scene from a Robert Altman movie. A mixed bag, then, best in its larger reaches.
Pub Date: Nov. 26, 1979
ISBN: 0374516006
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1979
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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