Move over, Ebola virus. There's a new epidemic on the global blockan airborne filovirus just as deadly and a hundred times more contagious. Ground zero is near the village of Muaratebo in Sumatra, an embarkation point for shipments of primates to research laboratories in the US. A dozen macaques dispatched from Muaratebo arrive in Delaware showing signs of a ferociously debilitating virus that attacks their lungs, moves on to other organs, and causes inescapable death within nine days in the macaques and also in any humans unlucky enough to come into close contact with them. Back in Sumatra, Holly Becker arrives for a visit to her 12-year-old twins, Emma and Lucywho've been staying with her ex-husband, medical botanist Jonathan Rhodesto find a nightmarish scenario: There's no word from Jonathan, no trace of him or the girls, and no way to get past the military roadblocks to the Rhodes enclave at Rafflesia Camp in the interior. Back stateside, Lt. Col. Carmen Travis, head pathologist at the US Army's Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, traces the outbreak of the epidemic to Muaratebo; but even as her task force packs for Sumatra, a British entomologist brings the Muaratebo virus to London, and a colleague of Travis's finds a link between the outbreak and a hush-hush genetic research project that went catastrophically awry in the New Mexico desert ten years before. If you're wondering how the infection traveled from New Mexico to Sumatra, and how Travis's team can overcome the conspiracy of silence to reunite frantic Holly Becker with her daughterswell, the answers to these questions turn out to be scarier than you can imagine. Lynch's debut spreads its excitement so breathlessly over so many time zones that it reads like a screenplay just waiting for the actors to breathe life into its forgettable cast. It would make a terrific movie for audiences who weren't satisfiedor scared offby Outbreak. (First printing of 100,000)
Pub Date: Aug. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-44842-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.
Hailed as heroes on a stateside tour before returning to Iraq, Bravo Squad discovers just what it has been fighting for.
Though the shellshocked humor will likely conjure comparisons with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, the debut novel by Fountain (following his story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, 2006) focuses even more on the cross-promotional media monster that America has become than it does on the absurdities of war. The entire novel takes place over a single Thanksgiving Day, when the eight soldiers (with their memories of the two who didn’t make it) find themselves at the promotional center of an all-American extravaganza, a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys football game. Providing the novel with its moral compass is protagonist Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old virgin from small-town Texas who has been inflated into some kind of cross between John Wayne and Audie Murphy for his role in a rescue mission documented by an embedded Fox News camera. In two days, the Pentagon-sponsored “Victory Tour” will end and Bravo will return to the business as usual of war. In the meantime, they are dealing with a producer trying to negotiate a film deal (“Think Rocky meets Platoon,” though Hilary Swank is rumored to be attached), glad-handing with the corporate elite of Cowboy fandom (and ownership), and suffering collateral damage during a halftime spectacle with Beyoncé. Over the course of this long, alcohol-fueled day, Billy finds himself torn, as he falls in love (and lust) with a devout Christian cheerleader and listens to his sister try to persuade him that he has done his duty and should refuse to go back. As “Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives,” Billy and his foxhole brethren discover treachery and betrayal beyond anything they’ve experienced on the battlefield.
War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-088559-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.
Glück’s international reputation as an accomplished and critically acclaimed contemporary poet makes the arrival of her new volume an eagerly anticipated event. This slender collection meets these expectations with 44 poems that pull the reader into a realm of meditation and memory. She sets most of them in the heat of summer—a time of year when nature seems almost oppressively heavy with life—in order to meditate on the myriad realities posed by life and death. Glück mines common childhood images (a grandmother transforming summer fruit into a cool beverage, two sisters applying fingernail polish in a backyard) to resurrect the intense feelings that accompany awakening to the sensual promises of life, and she desperately explores these resonant images, searching for a path that might reconcile her to the inevitability of death. These musings produce the kinds of spiritual insights that draw so many readers to her work: she suggests that we perceive our experiences most intensely when tempered by memory, and that such experiences somehow provide meaning for our lives. Yet for all her metaphysical sensitivity and poetic craftsmanship, Glück reaffirms our ultimate fate: we all eventually die. Rather than resort to pithy mysticism or self-obsessive angst, she boldly insists that death creeps in the shadows of even our brightest summers. The genius of her poems lies in their ability to sear the summertime onto our souls in such a way that its “light will give us no peace.”
A fine demonstration of the power and versatility of Glück’s verse, this volume will delight fans and intrigue newcomers.Pub Date: April 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-018526-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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