Another superficial treatment of Washington as a sinkhole for careers and marriages. Meanwhile, the moral issue of...
Debut fiction, set in the near future, from Nye (The Paradox of American Power, 2002, etc.), Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of Defense: a bland mix of turf wars, marriage wars, and the threat of religious war.
At the start, protagonist Peter Cutler hears he’s been fired as Undersecretary for Security Affairs at State; this is also the story’s climax, so there’s no suspense about his destiny. Thereafter, the chronology is straightforward. We get a quick look at Peter’s childhood in Maine, then it’s on to grad school at Princeton, where Peter studies political science and makes a couple of enduring friendships: with Jim Childress, aspiring politician, and Ali Aziz, a Pakistani studying nuclear engineering. Peter will also fall in love with Alexa, a stunning blond who’s not looking to commit; power is her thing. So Peter marries another looker, Kate Ling Chen, who will work for the university press while he becomes a Princeton prof (his field is nuclear proliferation). Raising two kids, they’re a happy family—until Peter gets Potomac fever. By then, Jim is managing the presidential campaign of Senator Wayne Kent, charismatic westerner. Peter joins the effort without consulting Kate and, after Kent’s election, accepts that plum job at State. Meanwhile in Pakistan, where Ali is running a nuclear research lab, Musharaff has been ousted by another general with radical Islamist sympathies. In DC, Peter scores some victories in the furious bureaucratic infighting but allows himself to be seduced by Alexa, also a big-time Washington player. Personal and political crises erupt simultaneously, and glibly: Kate, tipped off to Peter’s adultery, insists on a temporary separation, while Pakistan decides to transfer nukes to Iran. A CIA covert operation to pre-empt the transfer goes awry, Ali is among the victims, and Peter is made the fall guy.
Another superficial treatment of Washington as a sinkhole for careers and marriages. Meanwhile, the moral issue of pre-emption is obscured by operational details.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58648-226-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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