A Third World coalition possessing cheap nukes and the will to use them threatens Uncle Sam in this rousing and well-paced, if predictable, undersea yarn. In the near future, the world is once again at war, with the US and the United Islamic Front (or UIF) duking it out across the eastern half of the globe. Complicating the situation are the Japanese, who make and sell the ingenious weapons and have no compunctions about exploiting the war as both marketplace and testing ground. Both sides have big plans to bring the boys back home by Christmas (or Ramadan). The US is plotting a strike on UIF headquarters, hoping to kill its leader, Gen. Mohammed al-Sihoud. The UIF has Scorpion: a sub-launched cruise missile outfitted with a low-tech but lethal mix of nuclear waste and glue that, when burst over Washington, will cover the Beltway in radioactive gunk guaranteed not to come out in the wash for the next 20,000 years. Narrowly escaping the US attack on his compound, Sihoud roars off to a rendezvous with his submarine, the Hegira, which is steaming toward America with the Scorpion aboard. Before long, the US sniffs out Sihoud, dispatches some vessels in pursuit, and the chase is on. After the Hegira ices one Yankee sub and cripples another, the US sends in its heavy hitter: Captain Michael ``Patch'' Pacino, serving his second literary tour of duty aboard the USS Seawolf (after Attack of the Seawolf, 1993). Eventually, the Seawolf destroys the Hegira but is stranded at the bottom of the Atlantic, setting up a powerfully claustrophobic rescue sequence. DiMercurio depicts his villains with creativity and restraint, but the plot has few twists, and its outcome is seldom in doubt. Still, fans of Tom Clancy and his ilk could do a lot worse.
Pub Date: Aug. 30, 1994
ISBN: 1-55611-392-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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