Michael Crichton meets Indiana Jones in a campy, blatantly derivative, nonstop plot-boiler: great, gasping, mindless fun.
Australian thriller writer Reilly follows up his high-tech adventure Ice Station (1999), this time sending a mild-mannered professor on a breathless, hokey, beat-the-bad-guys hunt for an ancient Inca artifact that could blow apart the planet.
Starting on page one with a hapless French monk whose head explodes “like a watermelon,” the action just keeps on coming. William Race, a translator of ancient languages, is whisked out of his seedy NYU office and put on a US military jet to the Peruvian rainforest, where a gang of brilliantly able scientists (including Race’s former lover) and gruff military personnel are rushing to find an Inca statue that, according to an incomplete copy of a 16th-century manuscript Race can read as if it were a newspaper, was snatched from the clutches of murderous Spanish conquistadors and hidden in an undiscovered temple deep in the jungle. The catlike statue, called the Spirit of the People, was carved from a meteorite that smashed into Peru at the dawn of the Incan empire, and it just might contain a deadly concentration of an extraterrestrial element that, when combined with the latest, easily transportable doomsday technology, could destroy the Earth. At first, Race takes a backseat in most of the action here, watching as a rival bunch of homicidal German commandos fall prey to Indian arrows and monstrous cats. But, as nail-biting stunts, man-eating crocodiles, 11th-hour reversals, and other spectacular calamities reduce Reilly’s cast to a handful, Race learns that the triangular birthmark under his left eye just might be what the Incas believed to be the Mark of the Sun, and that, just like the original Incan prince who saved the statue from Pizarro’s looters, it just might be Race’s destiny to defend it against those who would exploit it for evil ends.
Michael Crichton meets Indiana Jones in a campy, blatantly derivative, nonstop plot-boiler: great, gasping, mindless fun.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26659-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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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