Superb print version of a video game shoot-’em-up.
Third installment in the way, way over-the-top action adventures of US Marine Shane “Scarecrow” Schofield, and the best yet from this Australian author (Contest, 2003, etc.).
Called Scarecrow because of his disfigured eyes, Schofield and a crack crew of Delta Force soldiers rush to a Siberian sub repair base that’s been overrun by Islamic terrorists who have seized a cache of nuclear missiles. But instead of terrorists, Schofield finds a trap set by competing teams of international bounty hunters who’ve already killed two Delta Force soldiers on an $18.6 million-per-head kill list that also has Schofield’s name on it. The list of 15 super-soldiers, spies, scientists and one terrorist was complied by Majestic 12, a secret council of supremely rich multinational military industrial complex tycoons who not only buy and sell governments but have been responsible for every late-20th-century conspiracy from the assassination of JFK to Clinton’s impeachment trial—except for 9/11. Thus begins a serious of breathless, thoroughly contrived, but immensely entertaining action scenes in which Schofield, fellow soldiers Libby Gant, Book II, and Mother join with bounty hunter Aloysius Knight (being paid by an anonymous client to protect Schofield) and Knight’s trusty pilot Rufus as they take on killer sharks, fancy sports cars, helicopters, jet aircraft, a supertanker, an entire aircraft carrier, X-15 rocket planes, and the combined air forces of five African nations to stop a plot to pit rival countries against each other and plunge the world into anarchy. The action is so accomplished that we don’t care about cheesy Star Wars dialogue, as when Jay Killian, the Ralph Lauren–wearing head of a multinational arms-manufacturing company, mercilessly guillotines one of Schofield’s buddies and Schofield vows to “kill them all.” An endless stream of interchangeable bad guys wind up “deader than disco,” and everyone agrees when the US President intones of Schofield that “the fate of the free world could be resting on that man’s shoulders.”
Superb print version of a video game shoot-’em-up.Pub Date: March 24, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-28958-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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