An observant medical thriller with intriguing potential.
In an intriguing but uneven debut thriller framed around family secrets and a passionate love affair, a medical researcher hits a disturbing roadblock when he requests permission to test his potentially groundbreaking cure for dementia on human subjects.
Self-absorbed and womanizing, Dr. Lloyd Copeland has gotten his dementia research to a crucial stage. Success with lab animals has led to the next step: approval for human testing. Lloyd is shocked when the review board at his medical facility questions the validity of his research and an autopsy report on a test mouse indicates fatal side effects. The originator of the report proves elusive, and signs begin pointing to sabotage. Complicating the plot—and the story’s continuity and consistency—is Erin, a beautiful medical ethicist who sits on the review board. Unfortunately, a jarring sophomoric tone in Lloyd’s personal and sexual relationships weakens the narrative. For instance, after a doctor friend tosses Erin and Lloyd into his backyard pool, Erin “casually” takes off her wet clothes, continues the visit in her bra and panties, and relishes “the way she was able to fluster” Lloyd. Characters repeatedly “smirk” and “pout.” Palmieri—a practicing physician—succeeds most strongly in rendering realistic medical settings and in his evocations of time and place: “He…picked up the Styrofoam cup and sat down in a booth of white Formica, chipped and scratched with countless initials, stained with cigarette burns.” Though some descriptive phrases create an unintentionally comical effect—“He grinned at her with clenched teeth as he gaped in those bottomless emerald eyes”—peripheral characters in particular come into the plot with deft brush strokes: At a Little League game, the “air was filled with the screams of overzealous parents whose voices carried like the jeers of huffy grackles. A red headed boy in the outfield held up his mitt to shade his eyes as he craned his neck back to look at the contrails of a high flying sic jet.” With another round of editing, revelations concerning lethal machinations and the family secret that propels Lloyd’s journey toward personal and professional redemption could have packed significant punch.
An observant medical thriller with intriguing potential.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484980767
Page Count: 314
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
