The tale of a forward air controller, or FAC, in the early days of the Vietnam War—from the author of the novel Cadillac Flight and A Lonely Kind of War. Major Sam Brooks is a fighter pilot, which should give him high status in the Air Force. Instead he's at the end of his career because of a brief affair with his commander's wife. The commander, a Colonel, has dogged Brooks and prevented promotions, despite the fact that Brooks is a fine pilot. Brooks comes to Vietnam with an attitude problem, and, sure enough, runs into his nemesis, who assigns him to a mucky, VC-infested outpost deep in the Mekong Delta, and who turns him into a FAC as well. A FAC guides jets into the target rather than piloting them himself; not only does this seem inglorious to Brooks, but it also seems as though his old enemy is trying to get him killed. Worse, Brooks is insubordinate to superior officers and impatient with garrison routines, so that's it's clear he brings most of his troubles on himself. There are compensations: a pretty civilian trying to introduce miracle rice to the Vietnamese, and the fact that Brooks begins to like flying the little Cessnas. Brooks is an attractive character: a lonely man, not truly a tough guy, and shy around women; his inadequacies for ground combat provide comic relief. But where Harrison, a former FAC pilot himself, shines is in his gripping descriptions of combat flight. The detail is unimpeachable: every creak in the struts, every hard right to dodge .51 caliber fire- -even the grease-pencil mark on the windshield, there to aim the hand-fired rockets. No politics at all here: just men working their machines, and yet when Brooks swoops low and for an instant sees a burning VC, he feels horror at what he's done. Brooks's love affair with Lee is predictable, but he himself is likably troubled, and the air scenes are nothing short of stunning.
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-89141-436-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Presidio/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
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
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
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