High-octane melodrama bearing a potent political and moral message. Isegawa delivers the goods.
The title of Ugandan-born Isegawa’s successor to his well-received Abyssinian Chronicles (2000) vividly suggests the quality of life in his homeland during the brutal military dictatorship of Idi Amin.
The story itself is a panorama initially focused on two ambitious men: Cambridge-educated Bat Katanga, who returns to Uganda in the early 1970s to seek a civil service job, and General Samson Bazooka Ondogar, who directs Amin’s murderous Anti-Smuggling Unit. Bat is (rather improbably) given a high-echelon executive position in the Ministry of Power and Communication, swiftly acquires influence and wealth, and attracts the love of Victoria, a brainy beauty who is Ondogar’s former mistress, and the “decoy” he employs to keep tabs on upwardly mobile underlings (like Bat). In swiftly paced juxtapositions that gradually expand to include numerous other characters variously involved with these three, Isegawa assembles a devastating portrait of a paranoid society riddled with rivalries and enmities and fuelled by quests for one-upmanship and revenge. Victoria bears Bat a daughter, but is discarded when he falls in love with village girl Babit. Attending a trade conference in Saudi Arabia, Bat is persuaded to accept a bribe from a power-hungry Arab billionaire, and his privileged life begins unraveling. Ondogar crosses swords with white criminal adventurer Robert Ashes, who has rapidly become Amin’s unprincipled strongman and former confidant—and the General also begins to sense his power slipping away. Anti-Amin rebellions multiply, embracing even such obscure citizens as Bat’s brother Tayari, an underachieving “fireworks specialist.” Bat is imprisoned, Victoria takes her vengeance, and the embattled country explodes. Snakepit isn’t well constructed, but its flailing energies create a fascinating narrative texture deepened by Isegawa’s sharp sardonic portrayals of its grasping, desperate characters and brooding empathy with their destroyed culture.
High-octane melodrama bearing a potent political and moral message. Isegawa delivers the goods.Pub Date: March 18, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41454-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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