A still-tough-as-leather former CIA operative and a genetically engineered boy prodigy race to save the world from a synthetic virus that gobbles up human blood: a zippy hardcover debut from the prolific Land. The hook and structure here are as pop paranoid as a good X-Files episode: With the collapse of the Evil Empire, all the old spies have to look inward for conspiracies and new foes. This time the foes are the menacing Nazi ÇmigrÇ scientist Dr. Erich Haslanger and his experimental-weapons crew, operating under US government sanction to develop innovative new ways of wasting people. When one of Haslanger's engineered ``offspring,''15-year-old wunderkind Josh Wolfe, accidentally releases what he thinks is a pollution-eating virus and instead wipes out the population of a mall (the grisly little bug reduces human bodies to husks of dried meat), the chase is on to secure the formula. Enter Susan Lyle, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researcher who figures out that it was Josh who devised the deadly virus, and Blaine McCracken, an honorable assassin out to explain the disappearance of his buddy from Nam, Josh's ``father.'' This one-man militia embarks on a chase that leads directly to Haslanger's high-security weapons compound, where McCracken and a seven-foot Native American friend shoot it out with the bad guys. After a confused Josh escapes with a vial of the deadly virus in his pocket, the story picks up speed rapidly, and entertainingly, as McCracken & Co. trash Disneyland in a beat-the-clock effort to recover Josh, prevent him from releasing the virus, and put an end to the original outbreak, which everyone only thought was over. It's got a kid, a girl, a hero, not to mention Nazis and even a mechanical dinosaur: a slick and serpentinely constructed triumph of boy fiction if ever there was one.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85971-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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