A crude but lively morality play.
Parents spare the rod and turn their child into the mythic founder of the Bloods in this lurid gangster saga.
There are familiar social influences at play in Rodney “Neon” Robinson’s development into a fearsome crime lord during the 1960s. His mother Doris walks out on her cheating husband Earl, transplants her brood from a small Texas town to Los Angeles’s crime-ridden Compton ghetto and raises them without an appropriate male role model in the home. But by far the most important factor is that–from the time little Neon throws a tantrum and receives a hot dog instead of a spanking–his parents refuse to mete out the whippings his misbehavior so richly deserves. Everything flows from that misguided lenience–arson, robbery, rape and murder, all of it crescendoing to a Sophoclean family tragedy. Along the way, Neon and his less epic brother Rap start the Bloods street gang during a stint in juvie, using candy shipments from Earl and Doris–there is no limit to their indulgence–as a patronage fund. (The origin of the Bloods’ nemeses, the Crips, is traced to one Willie Wright, a legendary bum-legged prison bodybuilder whose simmering beef with Neon sparks the historic red-vs.-blue antagonism.) Neon is a stone-cold thief and killer with no redeeming qualities except a lingering sentimentality toward his mom, and his story is an old-fashioned parable. As the heartbroken Doris is reminded by a succession of commentators, from the many well-meaning LAPD officers to the spirit messengers who appear to her in a vision, Neon’s infamies are the inevitable result of her failure to take a timely belt to his hide. The novel’s chief virtue is its vigorous and pungent, though stereotyped, portrait of ghetto life, stocked with sassy hookers, smooth pimps, menacing thugs and hapless wannabe hoodlums–and lots of earnest strivers wondering where their kids went wrong.
A crude but lively morality play.Pub Date: April 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-595-50877-8
Page Count: 264
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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