Madeline O'Keith Turner faces a sea of troubles upon becoming the first woman President of the US, and her military aide Robert Bender struggles to guide her through them in a heady change-of- pace yarn from Herman (Iron Gate, 1996, etc.) When a death in the Oval Office puts Maddy Turner in the White House, the comely widow looks for support from Patrick Shaw (her snaky chief of staff) and the true-blue Bender (a three-star Air Force general who wants only to be back with the troops). As it happens, the former California legislator may need something very like divine intervention. Her predecessor secretly sold out Taiwan, and an emboldened Peoples Republic of China is on the move in Asia. Obstinately more concerned with domestic social programs and tax reform, Maddy dithers while Bender burns. Meantime, an unholy alliance of reactionary senators and cabinet members (abetted by the faithless Shaw) is plotting to destroy the Turner presidency. Once the PRC displays its nuclear capabilities with a blast on a deserted but disputed atoll, however, the rookie Chief Executive honors the threat with semi-decisive action. Making Bender her National Security Advisor, she dispatches him to negotiate with the Communist Chinese. Before a deal can be done, hard-liners vying for power in Beijing detain her envoy. At length, she orders a tit-for- tat detonation, which comes a cropper when the atomic warhead fails to explode. With the clock running out on both America's prestige and Bender's life expectancy, the US military scrambles to put another bomb on the showcase target (now occupied by PRC troops). Until the close, though, there's a world of doubt as to whether the bleeding-heart Commander in Chief will use deadly force against an obvious foe. A conventionally macho technothriller with a wicked twist—a female President whose shaky grasp on geopolitical reality drives the absorbing narrative in surprising ways. (First printing of 50,000)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-380-97320-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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