A character driven, action-filled thriller pitting commies against capitalists.
Russian sleeper agents inserted throughout the U.S. for a Communist takeover may have found their way into the Oval Office in Sweet’s debut political thriller.
Successful Wisconsin businessman Edward “Brookie” Brookside, wanting to leave behind a rancorous divorce and an ex-wife hoping for more money from the recent sale of his company, heads to Livingston, Montana. There, he meets and befriends the elderly Susan, who offers him a place to stay on her ranch. Susan also confides in Brookie, telling him an elaborate story involving her late Communist husband. Years ago, their sickly young son, Johnny, was dying. Russian agents somehow convinced Susan to care for another boy. Susan didn’t publicly discuss Johnny’s inevitable death and raised the boy, whom she calls JT, as her own. But Susan’s greatest concern is that JT is now the U.S. president. Brookie contacts business associate Robert Gabersen, a military man who runs a security firm, to help Susan, who’s constantly monitored by the Secret Service, as well as ranch hand Art, who is feeding info to the Russians. Getting Susan to safety is only part of the job; Robert and Brookie recruit others to ensure that the commies don’t activate sleeper cells and assimilate America into a new USSR. The novel is an intelligent thriller, one that takes place somewhere in between a hot and a cold war. The action taken is a stealthy infiltration of the country, specifically designed to avoid devastating nuclear conflict. As such, casualties on both sides aren’t from battles but a series of alleged accidents, such as a car wreck or what appear to be random explosions. The first half of the novel, which centers on Brookie and Susan, is better; it’s mostly a buildup for the latter half, but the relationship between the two, which Brookie equates with siblings, develops at a slow but worthwhile pace. When the team counterattacks the Russian agents who are hiding in Cabinet positions, there’s little suspense, as the good guys face few challenges. Most of their plans, including the capture of a high-ranking agent’s assistant, go off without a hitch. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to watch a war that’s being fought as quietly as possible.
A character driven, action-filled thriller pitting commies against capitalists.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1460222539
Page Count: 336
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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