An enjoyable novel based on a piece of recent economic history.
A fictional account of the Greek financial crisis.
In this novel, Myers (Betrayal in Europe, 2015) blends wholly made-up characters—financial wizards Jim Schiller, Jack Hawkins, and James Smith; behind-the-scenes fixer Sophie d’Auverne—with fictional versions of the European leaders who were in the headlines as Greece struggled to meet its financial obligations and maintain its place in the European Union in 2015. (Those officials include Angela Merkel, Christine Lagarde, Mario Draghi, and Alexis Tsipras.) Sophie jets from one financial capital to another helping to arrange a deal that will head off financial chaos, while her fiance, Jim, sets out on his own damage-control mission after realizing that his hedge fund has gotten involved in risky Greek investments. Jack and James decide to bring the monarchy back to Greece, regardless of the elected government’s preferences, and everyone is spying on everyone else, hoping for an edge. In the end, a deal is reached, the financiers continue to make money, and reporters continue to pay more attention to Yanis Varoufakis’ motorcycle than to his country’s financial policies. Sophie, the story’s core, is always ready with a snappy comeback (“That’s my helicopter. Yours is the little one out on the horizon”) or a politically astute move. Balancing her professional obligations with keeping her teenage daughter in line and living up to her aristocratic family’s standards, she always remains thoroughly French. The other characters are people who use terms like “Grexit” in casual conversation, and their stories will appeal to readers who are similarly devoted to the machinations that surround global finance. Those same readers, however, may find the repeated explanations of the novel’s real-life characters (“mentioning the powerful German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, the number-two politician in Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition government”; “referring to Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister with the rock star reputation”; “referring to Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund”) superfluous. Yet the novel is fast-paced, with an intriguing plot (even for those who already know the outcome), and Myers demonstrates that a financial story can be a thriller even without a single drawn gun or weapon of mass destruction.
An enjoyable novel based on a piece of recent economic history.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5193-5262-0
Page Count: 220
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A bold but flawed debut novel.
There’s a mystery, a coming-of-age, abundant melodrama and even more abundant medical lore in this idiosyncratic first novel from a doctor best known for the memoir My Own Country (1994).
The nun is struggling to give birth in the hospital. The surgeon (is he also the father?) dithers. The late-arriving OB-GYN takes charge, losing the mother but saving her babies, identical twins. We are in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1954. The Indian nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, was a trained nurse who had met the British surgeon Thomas Stone on a sea voyage ministering to passengers dying of typhus. She then served as his assistant for seven years. The emotionally repressed Stone never declared his love for her; had they really done the deed? After the delivery, Stone rejects the babies and leaves Ethiopia. This is good news for Hema (Dr. Hemalatha, the Indian gynecologist), who becomes their surrogate mother and names them Shiva and Marion. When Shiva stops breathing, Dr. Ghosh (another Indian) diagnoses his apnea; again, a medical emergency throws two characters together. Ghosh and Hema marry and make a happy family of four. Marion eventually emerges as narrator. “Where but in medicine,” he asks, “might our conjoined, matricidal, patrifugal, twisted fate be explained?” The question is key, revealing Verghese’s intent: a family saga in the context of medicine. The ambition is laudable, but too often accounts of operations—a bowel obstruction here, a vasectomy there—overwhelm the narrative. Characterization suffers. The boys’ Ethiopian identity goes unexplored. Shiva is an enigma, though it’s no surprise he’ll have a medical career, like his brother, though far less orthodox. They become estranged over a girl, and eventually Marion leaves for America and an internship in the Bronx (the final, most suspenseful section). Once again a medical emergency defines the characters, though they are not large enough to fill the positively operatic roles Verghese has ordained for them.
A bold but flawed debut novel.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-41449-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
Cussler's most adult, least comic-strip-y entry yet in the Dirk Pitt sea sagas. Gone is the outlandish plotting of Treasure (1988), when Dirk found Cleopatra's barge in Texas, and of Sahara (199), which unearthed Lincoln's body in a Confederate sub—buried in the desert sands. Now, in his 11th outing, Dirk Pitt and his National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) fight villainous megalomaniac Arthur Dorsett, head of Dorsett Consolidated Mining, which holds the world's wealthiest diamond-mine empire. Pitt and his team must fight as well Dorsett's three daughters, the coldly beauteous Amazonian Boudicca, whose giant strength dwarfs Dirk's; the elegant but heartless Deirdre; and the star-crossed zoologist Maeve, whose bastard twins are held captive by grandfather Arthur so that Maeve will infiltrate NUMA and report on its investigation of his holdings—even though Dirk recently saved Maeve and Deirdre's lives in the Antarctic. First, however, Cussler takes us back to 1856 and a typhoon-battered British clipper ship, the Gladiator, that sinks in uncharted seas off Australia; only eight survive, including Jess Dorsett "the highwayman," a dandyish-looking convict, who discovers raw diamonds when stranded on an uninhabited island. From this arises the Dorsett empire, bent on undermining the world market in diamonds by dumping a colossal backlog of stones and colored gems into its vast chain of jewelry stores and, with one blow, toppling De Beers and all rivals. Worse, Arthur Dorsett excavates by high-energy-pulsed ultrasound, and when ultrasound from all four of his island mines (one on Gladiator Island, near New Zealand, another by Easter Island, the last two in the North Pacific Ocean) happen to converge, a killer shock wave destroys all marine and human life for 30 kilometers around, and now threatens over a million people in Hawaii—unless Dirk Pitt's aging body can hold it back. Tireless mechanical nomenclature, but furious storytelling.
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80297-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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