Berent's US Air Force saga (Rolling Thunder, Steel Tiger, Phantom Leader) continues, taking his pilots and commandos into Laos and a late-1968 battle to protect a radar outpost. With only a few weeks to go before the presidential election, both the North Vietnamese and Lyndon Johnson are working on plans to swing the vote the way they want it to go. They both like Hubert Humphrey. President Johnson is getting ready to pull the plug on bombing north of the Demilitarized Zone, and the North Vietnamese are trying to choreograph the ``confession'' of a downed airman with a military action against the American radar base in Laos that controls much of the sky over their country. Recurring heroes Court Bannister and Wolf Lochert, pilot and supercommando, respectively, head for the threatened installation, pausing only for a little short, sweet, dalliance in Thailand. Meanwhile, fellow recurring hero and currently imprisoned pilot Algernon A. ``Flak'' Apple endures near-fatal beatings and psychological torture after almost escaping Hanoi. And Shawn Bannister, radical journalist, recurring villain and half-brother to Court Bannister, heads for Hanoi, unaware that he is being manipulated by Hanoi and Washington concurrently. If everything works out the way Hanoi plans, there will be dramatic revelations from the hospital in Hanoi at the very moment that either the North Vietnamese Army or their partners in socialist solidarity, the Soviets, overrun the radar. There is, by the way, a pretty but rather loose American lady hanging around the radar controls swilling gin and ogling the gents. Open your eyes for the flight and fight scenes, close them for the sex and politics.
Pub Date: June 8, 1992
ISBN: 0-399-13722-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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