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VOYAGE OF THE DEVILFISH

Last-gasp cold war hostilities provide an American submarine commander the opportunity to avenge his father's death. Authentic naval detail distinguishes the debut of the author, an Annapolis graduate and submarine sailor. The plot-generating treachery at the highest levels of the former Soviet navy is a standard military thriller device, but the firsthand feel for life aboard a nuclear hunter-killer sub—as well as for warfare under the polar icecap—is fresh and welcome in this not-too-technothriller. At a time when the superpowers are supposedly dismantling their superweapons, second-generation submarine skipper Michael Pacino speeds U.S.S. Devilfish to the Arctic to sniff out a huge and remarkably stealthy new Russian sub. Commanding the fleet submarine Kalingrad over the nominal control of the boat's unhappy captain is unreconstructed Bolshevik Admiral Alexi Novskoyy—who's about to implement his private plan to knock international relations back to the late 40's with an unprovoked attack on the US. It's not his first time at wielding his own foreign policy. As a sub skipper back in the 70's, Novskoyy, without provocation, torpedoed an American boat that found his polar hiding place. The American captain in that incident was Michael Pacino's father. Novskoyy is not completely alone in his plot. He's got a mole placed at the very top of the Pentagon, an Air Force general who keeps assuring the President that the sudden appearance of the complete Russian northern submarine fleet off the American East Coast is just an exercise. The President may be buying that story, but the admiral in charge of America's Atlantic submarine fleet, Pacino's mentor and godfather, is having none of it. He sends his godson orders to do whatever may be necessary to call the Russians to heel. Tense and, when at sea, chillingly realistic. There's a hefty glossary at the end, but DiMercurio's action needs no technical assistance.

Pub Date: Aug. 18, 1992

ISBN: 1-55611-291-2

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Donald Fine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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