A mature rumination on war that will have extra appeal for WWII buffs.
McCall (Set Apart, 2010) offers a small-town coming-of-age story that deepens as it blends into real-life World War II history.
Eighteen-year-old Corbin O’Connell lives in Judson, Pennsylvania, a charming small town that’s reminiscent of It’s a Wonderful Life’s Bedford Falls (but without Mr. Potter). Corbin is being pursued by the conniving Velma Hix, but he’s really in love with Daisy Hall. However, Daisy and Corbin’s best friend, John Ottinger, the scion of Judson’s richest family, have long been an item, and Corbin respects that. Desperate to escape the farm, Corbin sees joining the Army, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, as a godsend. In the late summer of 1942, he and a reluctant John arrive in Europe—months after D-Day, when the war is expected to safely wind down. But instead, they’re just in time for the Battle of the Bulge, Germany’s last desperate move. Very soon, Corbin is captured, and he’s eventually taken to Berga, a slave-labor camp. The brutality that the men experience there is nearly unimaginable, as their sadistic captors hold the Geneva Convention protocols in contempt. As the men starve and freeze, they hear the American and British planes overhead; they’re eventually saved only by the German surrender. Overall, McCall is an adept writer who delivers by showing the everyday aspects of war, as well as the big picture: “Veneered over the devastation of war was the confusion of war—the delayed, lost and wrong information that was, in its own way, nearly as damaging as bullets flying at the front.” The novel becomes even more engrossing in later chapters when Corbin gets back to Judson—and he’s a far different person from the kid who thought his escape would be a lark.
A mature rumination on war that will have extra appeal for WWII buffs.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9845589-2-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: JJ Publishers
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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