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
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
Spielman’s debut charms as Brett briskly careens from catastrophe to disaster to enlightenment.
Devastated by her mother’s death, Brett Bohlinger consumes a bottle of outrageously expensive Champagne and trips down the stairs at the funeral luncheon. Add embarrassed to devastated. Could things get any worse? Of course they can, and they do—at the reading of the will.
Instead of inheriting the position of CEO at the family’s cosmetics firm—a position she has been groomed for—she’s given a life list she wrote when she was 14 and an ultimatum: Complete the goals, or lose her inheritance. Luckily, her mother, Elizabeth, has crossed off some of the more whimsical goals, including running with the bulls—too risky! Having a child, buying a horse, building a relationship with her (dead) father, however, all remain. Brad, the handsome attorney charged with making sure Brett achieves her goals, doles out a letter from her mother with each success. Warmly comforting, Elizabeth’s letters uncannily—and quite humorously—predict Brett’s side of the conversations. Brett grudgingly begins by performing at a local comedy club, an experience that proves both humiliating and instructive: Perfection is overrated, and taking risks is exhilarating. Becoming an awesome teacher, however, seems impossible given her utter lack of classroom management skills. Teaching homebound children offers surprising rewards, though. Along Brett’s journey, many of the friends (and family) she thought would support her instead betray her. Luckily, Brett’s new life is populated with quirky, sharply drawn characters, including a pregnant high school student living in a homeless shelter, a psychiatrist with plenty of time to chat about troubled children, and one of her mother’s dearest, most secret companions. A 10-step program for the grief-stricken, Brett’s quest brings her back to love, the best inheritance of all.
Spielman’s debut charms as Brett briskly careens from catastrophe to disaster to enlightenment.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-54087-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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