An excellent, comprehensive read for any serious student of the Elizabethan Age and anyone concerned with intolerance.
This sequel to Stainer’s Joachim’s Magic has Joachim Gans back in Elizabethan England, where he is accused of heresy while his apprentice, Reis Courtney, works his way toward manhood.
The story opens at sea, where Joachim, Reis, Hans Altschmer, Thomas Hariot, and others from the failed Virginia enterprise are returning home. Reis, swept overboard, is rescued from drowning by Hans. Ashore, Reis is left with his Uncle Allyn and family at their hardscrabble farm in Surrey while Thomas and Joachim are summoned by the queen, who wants the master metallurgist to find a more efficient way of refining saltpeter for gunpowder due to the looming war with Spain. Rescued from Surrey, young Reis joins his two mentors in an audience with the queen, an exciting and intimidating experience. He also meets Robert Marchette, who will be an important and generous influence in his life. He accompanies Joachim to Bristol to help in the saltpeter venture under a royal grant. But Jews are not welcome in England, and soon Joachim is charged as a heretic (he has never tried to hide or deny his faith). This very delicate case goes to the queen’s Privy Council and is finally dismissed. But by then Joachim has had enough abuse from these English, and he returns to his native Prague. Sir Walter Raleigh tries to tempt Reis to join his planned expedition to “El Dorado” in South America. It is indeed tempting, but Reis declines and is hired by Marchette where, his foreshadowed talent emerging, he becomes the horse trainer on Marchette’s country estate. Characters and character carry this inspiring YA read. Some are historical. Joachim and Thomas have major roles, while Queen Elizabeth, Raleigh, and others are relatively minor but important to flesh things out. Others—Marchette, Hans, Hugh Salter (who finally stops whining and finds his vocation)—are fictional but no less real and admirable, each in his way. Change is a strong motif. Hans has become a changed man from the previous novel, now a stalwart friend of Joachim’s and a cheerful and indefatigable giant who teaches Reis and Hugh the value of work and the manly art of self-defense. It’s easy to lose patience with the jejune Hugh, but the adults keep the faith in him and are rewarded. Patience is indeed a virtue here. Joachim, Thomas, Hans, and others know instinctively that they have an important job—to make a man, a good man, out of Reis—and each does his job admirably, mostly by being an excellent male role model. And Stainer does a wonderful job of evoking the contrasts in a great city as an awestruck boy first encounters it: “The sounds of London Town assailed his ears, the hawkers, the street vendors, the bustle of many people moving about their business. The smells combined fresh baked bread and a sour smell of offal, sewage and something else quite indefinable.”
An excellent, comprehensive read for any serious student of the Elizabethan Age and anyone concerned with intolerance.Pub Date: March 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4787-8644-3
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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