A sharply written war novel that powerfully evokes the camaraderie and conflict of a Marine headquarters during wartime; a...
Smith’s meticulous debut novel captures the daily routines of a U.S. Marine base during the Vietnam War.
Phillip “Duke” Dukesheirer, working for a racehorse trainer at Suffolk Downs, is accused of doping one of the horses. He has two choices—face expulsion from the world of horse racing or join the Marines. Too young to consider blemishing his racing career, he soon finds himself on his way to Vietnam. At Camp Horn, the headquarters of the III Marine Amphibious Force in Da Nang, he works at the Photographic Imagery Interpretation Center analyzing aerial reconnaissance photographs. Daily, he stares down a stereoscope looking for potential North Vietnamese Army rocket sites—often until the veins in his eyeballs “begin to look like a contour map of Mount Suribachi.” He is surrounded by a colorful cast of Marine personnel, from the surly cigar-chewing Sgt. Fuller to the mischievous Cpl. Howie Barlow, who dreams of stealing a stash of air hostesses’ silk panties amassed by the air controllers at the air base. The novel examines the Vietnam War from the point of view of those not directly involved in frontline firefights—although Duke and his buddies do not escape close-quarters combat. In many respects, Smith highlights the sheer mundanity of war as Duke scours photograph after photograph of dense jungle. The emphasis is on the men themselves and their relationships with one another as well as with the locals. Smith’s prose is tight and descriptive: “Minute curlicues of charred plastic from the melted negatives mixed with the thick smoke and billowed upwards until the curlicues began to cool and parachute to the ground in limitless numbers.”
A sharply written war novel that powerfully evokes the camaraderie and conflict of a Marine headquarters during wartime; a must for aficionados of the genre.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73290-871-0
Page Count: 549
Publisher: Prospect Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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