Will make readers sweat with its relentless pace and blistering descriptions of the African sun.
A special unit of soldiers in East Africa tracks down elephant poachers and searches for a female archaeologist who’s been kidnapped in Bond’s latest adventure (Saving Paradise, 2013, etc.).
Ian MacAdam, formerly of the British Special Forces, is living an unhappy married life on an African ranch. He agrees to join a team to combat poachers targeting Kenya’s elephants, which are dangerously low in numbers. But when a trio of Somali men assault a camp of archaeologists, it becomes personal for MacAdam. One of the people taken hostage is Rebecca Hecht, MacAdam’s former girlfriend. He braves the vast, unforgiving desert to rescue the woman he still loves. The novel is sheer intensity, depicting the immense, arid land and never-ending scenes of people trekking across it. The villains are clear from the beginning: a Samburu warrior survives the harsh desert and its resident animals only to be gunned down by a Somali poacher, simply for the warrior’s lion pelt. Despite this, the three men holding Rebecca captive—Ibrahim, Rashid and Warwar—are so strongly developed that the youngest, Warwar, is almost sympathetic (to both readers and Rebecca); though he wants to sell or ransom the woman, the other two see no value in her and would rather kill her. The fierce African heat radiates from the pages; mosquitoes zoom around characters, and the air burns MacAdam’s throat, while his perspiration blinds him. But it’s the volatile nature of nature itself that gives the story its greatest distinction; Kenya is inhabited by creatures both beautiful and menacing. That MacAdam is out to save the elephants doesn’t stop a buffalo from charging him; when Rebecca tries to escape her captors, she realizes that a trailing leopard could be a much more unpleasant enemy. Readers should brace themselves for the book’s unabated savagery, mostly, if not all, from its human characters: A scene of poachers attacking and killing elephants is not easy to forget. But it does allow for a bit of zealous glee when MacAdam convinces himself to help track down poachers “to hunt the only animal worth hunting.”
Will make readers sweat with its relentless pace and blistering descriptions of the African sun.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1627040082
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mandevilla Press
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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