Skip the high-tech antics and Tracy/Hepburn banter: when it comes to high-seas action, Garrison is at the crest of the wave.
Screwball romance and homage to Jules Verne as an unlikely couple tangle with a demented billionaire’s secret weapon.
Garrison (Buried at Sea, Feb. 2002, etc.) has so admirably established himself as craftsman of sailing adventure that there’s an urge to skip the plot details and get to the fun stuff: the delightfully dangerous drama of flawed but intrepid loners finding new strengths on the open sea as they beat the bad guys every time. Our intrepid loner this time is David Hope, former journalist who runs scuba charters out of the Virgin Islands. Just as he scatters the ashes of his former lover, his boat is nearly destroyed by a US Navy submarine whose commander thinks Hope might have something to do with a computer shutdown that near nearly sank the sub. After the sub lets him go, Hope returns to Tortula to find that the last charter of the season has canceled. The screwball antics set in when he fails to pick up Sally Moffit, an undersea nature filmmaker, at a bar, and even so ends up helping her (she’s has just been dumped by her filmmaker husband) steal some of her husband’s equipment, then agrees to take her to Bermuda to film the mating habits of a species of dolphin. Before romance can bloom, the two see a dolphin with the size and lethal abilities of a killer whale. Before they can learn more about it, they’re hailed by William Tree, unctuous, effusively polite, repulsively fat offshore oil mogul who lives aboard an enormous sailing ship. It gives nothing away to say that Tree, dolphin, and computer failure are linked, that Tree is more of a Dr. Frankenstein than a Captain Nemo, and that he’ll use Hope and Moffit as target for a nasty new weapon.
Skip the high-tech antics and Tracy/Hepburn banter: when it comes to high-seas action, Garrison is at the crest of the wave.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-008167-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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