Kulish arrives at a different sort of truth about the war in Iraq than can be found in nonfiction accounts, and shows a deft...
A compelling first novel uses humor to illuminate the deadly absurdities of war.
Though Kulish reported from Iraq as an embedded journalist for the Wall Street Journal (he has since become an editorial writer for the New York Times), this fictional debut extends well beyond his own experience. His protagonist is a young, hapless gossip columnist named Jimmy Stephens, who works for a New York tabloid that is in the midst of repositioning itself to replace fluff with harder news. After bungling a supposed scoop, Stephens is given one last chance to save his job: Go to Iraq on the eve of war and travel with the Marines as an embedded reporter. Why Stephens? In an unfortunate (and unlikely) coincidence, he shares the same name as a distinguished war correspondent who has suffered an accident, and the list of approved embedded reporters permits no substitutions. So, this James Stephens will have to pass for that one, though it becomes immediately apparent that the younger Stephens’ fields of expertise—bedding little-known models, exploiting his expense account for impossibly priced sushi, chasing rumors—will do him little good in a war-ravaged desert. Yet Stephens ultimately bonds better with some of the enlisted men who are closer to his age than with the self-important war correspondents and the officers they befriend. And he employs some unconventional methods for using the tools of his trade to gain the access he needs for the stories he writes, which aren’t necessarily the stories that his editors back home want to read. Ultimately, Jimmy experiences a number of revelations—about the nature of journalism, about the fraternity of soldiers, about the unpredictability of war, about his own values. He leaves the war a very different reporter.
Kulish arrives at a different sort of truth about the war in Iraq than can be found in nonfiction accounts, and shows a deft command of tone—from the slapstick to the tragic—in the process.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-118939-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperPerennial
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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