Plenty of action and horrific thrills, without a salty clich‚ in sight. A splendid debut.
Exciting, and occasionally gruesome, debut swashbuckler that replaces Hollywood conventions of swordplay and
melodramatic revenge with brutally frank historical realism. We shouldn't pity poor William Williams. The highly educated, overweight Welsh lad had one too many at a dockside English tavern and woke up aboard a British slaveship, where his ability to play the fiddle gets him out of the most miserable shipboard labors. While off the coast of west Africa, the ship is raided by the brooding, taciturn pirate Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts, a peculiar fop who prefers to take ships without a fight (but won't hesitate to slaughter a ship's inhabitants if he meets resistence), dresses in ludicrous finery and drinks cold tea instead of ale or rum. The illiterate Roberts takes Williams aboard to entertain the crew, and act as a factotum who will record his obsessive quest for the Juliet, a merchant ship that a crustier crewman likens to "the fairest maiden . . . [with] the constitution of a highlander and the speed of a burned cat." So begins a kind of Billy Bathgate—story on the high seas, as Roberts—assisted by Aged Q, unflappable ship's surgeon Dr. Scudamore, and a oddly mystical escaped slave named Innocent who has memorized the New Testament and The Odyssey (he thinks they describe the same god)—shows how the pirate life was anything but carefree. Storms, battles, disease, and other calamities rapidly burn away Williams's baby fat, and, within months, a boy of 20 feels himself a man, though he clearly lacks the maturity to understand the emotional isolation that Roberts must maintain to keep his command. Though the historical Roberts was reputed to be the most skillful pirate of the 18th century, taking some four hundred ships in four years, Griffin animates his tale with a discomforting sense of dread, as every victory brings Williams and his captain closer to their doom.
Plenty of action and horrific thrills, without a salty clich‚ in sight. A splendid debut.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50336-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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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