A sufficient thriller that, without truly condemning either side, profoundly examines the consequences of war for the U.S....
In Vancans’ debut historical thriller, a covert Japanese faction threatens to detonate nuclear weapons on American soil as revenge for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
A vintage World War II–era B-29 bomber crashing into the Statue of Liberty on Thanksgiving Day is an orchestrated act and only the beginning. A group called the Bushido Element takes credit and claims to have two fission bombs targeting two unnamed U.S. cities. The group further demands that America change the terms of Japan’s 1945 surrender, removing Article 9, which prohibits Japan from maintaining a military force. The U.S. sends Garret Wakefield, an Asia intelligence operative, to Kyoto to find Jesuit priest Robert Cody, a former Army officer who investigated the 1945 disappearance of Lucky Strike—the same bomber used in Japan’s recent strike. Cody was also an anti-nuclear activist who, if not part of the attack, can certainly help locate the Bushido Element before the group triggers its weapons. Vancans’ methodically paced novel takes an intriguing approach by doling out sympathy for the aggressors. The book opens with Asoku Tamura, who’s in Hiroshima with her children when the city is bombed. But there are other motives behind Japan’s assault: the son of key Bushido member Saburo Rashima, a descendant of a hibakusha (a survivor of the atomic devastation), has severe physical problems related to the fallout; and China’s takeover of Taiwan, made vulnerable by the lack of U.S. defense after 9/11, is the reason Japan wants a military. Vancans keeps the story largely in Japan, but suspense holds on in America because no one knows where the bombs are. There are also a few mysteries unresolved until later, the most fascinating being how exactly Japan managed to hijack Lucky Strike, which in 1945 was carrying a third atom bomb to drop on Kyoto. The narrative does on occasion become repetitive. In particular, Wakefield tends to ask questions to which he already knows the answers, such as those about the connections between Saburo and his great-uncle Takamori Rashima or Takamori’s mistress, Fujiko. It’s unclear whether it’s Wakefield’s interrogation tactic or that he simply doesn’t remember; either way, it unnecessarily slows down the story. The ending, though, adds a nice turn when an unlikely ally comes to America’s aid.
A sufficient thriller that, without truly condemning either side, profoundly examines the consequences of war for the U.S. and Japan.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1300874270
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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