A washed-up American officer joins a gang of grizzled German WW II veterans seeking vengeance against the SS captain who murdered their comrades and then rose to the top of the East German secret police. Scott has taken on the Vietnam War (The Expendables, 1991, etc.) and now heats up the last days of the cold war. Battered and bruised by a scandalous divorce, his military career washed down the tubes with booze, Lt. Col. Jake Tallon gets his last assignment—a desk job in Berlin, where his superiors hope he will fade away. But Tallon doesn't fade. Sucking in his breath and limiting himself to light beers, Jake analyzes the military readiness of his new office, finds it wanting, kicks backsides, and takes names. He also meets pretty, half-German Kristina Hastings, his local State Department oppo, and becomes involved with her and her widowed dad, Axel Mader. Herr Mader, a wealthy contractor, still entertains hopes of finding Horst Volker, the Nazi officer who, in the last days of the Third Reich, executed Mader's exhausted paratroopers for their failure to hold off the advancing Russians. Volker went straight from the SS to the Stasi, the new East German secret service that he rose to control. But the East German government has begun to be shaken by the general collapse of communism, and Volker's invulnerability is no longer certain. When Jake and Axel at last go to battle with Volker, they are joined by Jake's resourceful former sergeant and two of the German officers who swore with Axel to bring Volker to justice. The toughest of the bunch is Jorn Furman, the man whose legs Volker shot off and whose life in the workers' paradise has been made hell by Volker's Stasi. Plucky old soldiers fight a good fight—in an improbable but rousing adventure.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-345-37753-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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