A moving adventure story about the volatility of the father-son bond.
In Birdseye’s oddly compelling fiction debut, a father-son hiking trip goes violently wrong.
Josh Donaldson is convinced—browbeaten, really—by his charismatic, literate, slightly unbalanced father to go for a long, running hike in Oregon’s wild and remote Cedar Ridge. Dad has always been an outsize figure in Donaldson’s life, writing long unpublished novels and constantly challenging his family to unconventional thinking. His force of personality overcomes Donaldson’s reservations about hiking and running in a wilderness area unknown to both of them. Once they reach their starting point, these reservations are only deepened by warnings from locals, who point out both the dangers of the terrain—“The woods are always dangerous. Damn foolish city folk are always comin’ up here and gettin’ lost”—and the presence in the woods of a major drug runner known as the Columbian. But Dad gets his way, and soon the two of them are encountering the beauties of the Oregon backcountry, beautifully described by Birdseye. Displaying virtually no hiking or camping skills, Dad instead waxes poetic at every turn, reciting Keats upon seeing a swollen mountain stream, which prompts a doubtful Donaldson to reflect that the water seemed “too real, and far too perilous to be poetic, except perhaps in a poem depicting death by means of forces beyond reason.” Inevitably, the two encounter the Columbian’s men, and violence erupts; Birdseye’s formerly ruminative narrative pace sharpens considerably once father and son confront the Columbian himself, who turns out to be oddly similar to Dad in both his wide reading and his penchant for crackpot philosophizing. “The fate of mankind ultimately doomed to perish from the cold is of no consequence,” the Columbian says. “Taken to heart it is a tragedy of unendurable proportions.” Dad is wounded, and Donaldson is certain he’s going to die, but even in these fairly standard hikers-in-peril sections, Birdseye raises his plot above the commonplace with detailed and quite touching depiction of Dad’s loss of confidence in his ebullient view of life—and of Donaldson’s loss of confidence in Dad.
A moving adventure story about the volatility of the father-son bond.Pub Date: May 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4771-0789-8
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
