An intelligently crafted novel, but one that’s more interested in reproducing real-life events than inventing new ones.
In this political thriller, a talented tech guru helps a controversial real estate magnate become president and becomes embroiled in his nefarious dealings.
In a remarkable upset, billionaire businessman Harold P. Franks—modeled, in large part, on Donald Trump—wins the presidency, defeating seasoned political veteran Eleanor Wilson. He wins by divisively pandering to disgruntled racists and unrepentant nationalists. Eli Green, a tech wizard working for a prominent data analytics firm, contributed to the victory, and he so thoroughly impresses his superiors that he’s invited to join Franks’ administration. He’s tasked with compiling and parsing data on voter fraud, but first, he’s given a more sensitive assignment—to prepare a cellphone for Franks that’s entirely private and unknown to members of the so-called “deep state” who might want to listen in on his communications. As Green accomplishes this, he stumbles upon a text message to Franks that reads “don’t forget,” along with a video of the president apparently about to have sex with a young Russian girl. Green finally decides that he not only wants to jump ship, but also blow the whistle on his boss, and he contacts the FBI and a New York Times reporter. But when the journalist turns up dead, Green realizes that bringing down a president isn’t so easy. Debut author James shines most brightly when delving deeply into Franks’ idiosyncrasies, and he sensitively limns his—and, by extension, Trump’s—strange public power: “When he spoke, the words were nearly always empty, or so full of contradiction that it rendered them meaningless; and so the listener projected an image of the world they already identified with, for better or worse.” However, the plot borrows very generously from current events; indeed, the author meticulously—almost journalistically—re-creates multiple controversies that have swirled around Trump’s presidency, including a possibly collusive relationship with Russia, an adversarial contretemps with an FBI director (whom Franks finally fires), and an embattled standoff with the press. As a result, readers looking for a fictional reprieve from political news won’t find it here.
An intelligently crafted novel, but one that’s more interested in reproducing real-life events than inventing new ones.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-980841-86-9
Page Count: 241
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
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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