Berent continues his highly detailed Vietnam War saga (Rolling Thunder, Steel Tiger), taking his Air Force flyers into 1968 and the Tet offensive. Quotations from Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, which they would probably like everyone to forget, open this volume that covers fewer than eight weeks of the war—the period of the final buildup to, and execution of, the single most important countrywide offensive by North Vietnam against South Vietnam. Captain Toby Parker, the gifted flyer who washed out of fighter training in a drunken fog, now flies forward observer missions in small propeller planes. When his reported sightings of North Vietnamese tanks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail are discounted by his superiors, he goes in for a closer look and photographs but is brought down and captured by the enemy. It takes the Special Forces to free him and to start the trip back to his base with the news that a really big action is underway. Major Algernon ``Flak'' Apple, shot down over North Vietnam, has been less fortunate. He is a prisoner in the Hanoi Hilton. Major Court Bannister, one shootdown short of becoming an ace (it takes five), has been pulled from the Hanoi bombing runs and sent to purgatory in South Vietnam after apparent violations of the Rules of Engagement. Lt. Colonel Wolf Lochert continues his one-man guerrilla war. And as the top brass continue to ignore the signs of a mammoth coordinated assault coming from the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, Lyndon Johnson hopes to deal with Ho Chi Minh like a fellow Texan. When the offensive finally comes, the surprised Americans and South Vietnamese stagger and then fight the enemy off. It's a military victory for the South—and a political and public-relations victory for the North. The high quality of Berent's reporting—as well as the professional insights that distinguished the earlier volumes— continues to make this one of the best Vietnam War fictional histories.
Pub Date: May 9, 1991
ISBN: 0-399-13603-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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