A detailed, thought-provoking read for rational beings the world over.
Rosen’s (Return to Roswell, 2012) sequel determines whether humanity’s face-to-face contact with an alien race will lead to enlightenment or destruction.
After being captured and later released by the U.S. government for his role in trying to expose the 1947 UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico (as seen in the previous installment), Washington Post photographer Casey Foster is now a celebrity. President Barack Obama has beamed out an invitation for the aliens to visit Earth, and humanity awaits their arrival. Casey and his girlfriend, newly minted Post writer Leah Anne Bailey, have secured positions as chroniclers of the historic meeting as it unfolds. The aliens, known as the Redexians, travel the galaxy in a vast mother ship and hope to retrieve a pair of extraterrestrial explorers who crashed in Roswell—and subsequently died. When Capt. Oulah IV requests that four humans visit the mother ship, Casey and Leah Anne are perfect choices; Israeli diplomat Jacob R.T. Witwenova and Chinese Col. Chloe Anh Sing join them. The CIA trains the quartet in spycraft so that they may learn all they can about the Redexians’ technology, as well as their true intentions toward Earth. Although everyone hopes for the best, they prepare for the worst—which would mean the Redexians enslaving or annihilating mankind. Author Rosen provides a prologue summarizing the previous volume before diving into a world shaken by the reality of extraterrestrial intelligence. He offers immensely detailed scenes in which world leaders, including President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, plan and execute the world’s response. The narrative optimistically surmises that there’s a “blank slate...to write a safe chapter of first interactions between different species from different worlds.” It balances thoroughly researched space travel science with quirky humor, as in a scene in which Capt. Oulah wears “powder blue lounging attire” and “fluffy green slippers.” Although Rosen does tend to pad his prose with time-worn phrases (“Time to roll the bones. Long live the Queen,” thinks a British ambassador), his surprising—and hilarious—solution to Earth’s ills will leave readers feeling hopeful.
A detailed, thought-provoking read for rational beings the world over.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-98-828075-5
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Silver Alien Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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