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
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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While a few weeks ago it seemed as if Praeger would have a two month lead over Dutton in their presentation of this Soviet best seller, both the "authorized" edition (Dutton's) and the "unauthorized" (Praeger's) will appear almost simultaneously. There has been considerable advance attention on what appears to be as much of a publishing cause celebre here as the original appearance of the book in Russia. Without entering into the scrimmage, or dismissing it as a plague on both your houses, we will limit ourselves to a few facts. Royalties from the "unauthorized" edition will go to the International Rescue Committee; Dutton with their contracted edition is adhering to copyright conventions. The Praeger edition has two translators and one of them is the translator of Doctor Zhivago Dutton's translator, Ralph Parker, has been stigmatized by Praeger as "an apologist for the Soviet regime". To the untutored eye, the Dutton translation seems a little more literary, the Praeger perhaps closer to the rather primitive style of the original. The book itself is an account of one day in the three thousand six hundred and fifty three days of the sentence to be served by a carpenter, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. (Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner.) From the unrelenting cold without, to the conditions within, from the bathhouse to the latrine to the cells where survival for more than two weeks is impossible, this records the hopeless facts of existence as faced by thousands who went on "living like this, with your eyes on the ground". The Dutton edition has an excellent introduction providing an orientation on the political background to its appearance in Russia by Marvin Kalb. All involved in its publication (translators, introducers, etc.) claim for it great "artistic" values which we cannot share, although there is no question of its importance as a political and human document and as significant and tangible evidence of the de-Stalinization program.
Pub Date: June 15, 1963
ISBN: 0451228146
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1963
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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