A concise but considerable thriller, and a fine companion piece to the author’s similarly themed debut.
A former news anchor and a college professor find themselves on the run from a lethal U.S. agency in the second political thriller from Fischer (The Blood of Tyrants, 2009).
Law professor Ken Bannister comes into possession of a cassette tape of the White House Chief of Staff implicating the administration in a murder plot. Believing he’s in danger, he calls his old friend Brian Everett, who was once a TV news reporter and wrote a San Francisco Chronicle article criticizing the president’s response to a protest. They soon realize that terrorist assaults around the country may be domestically orchestrated. Both men catch the attention of the Federal Security Force, which treats any unfavorable actions or words against the government as high treason. At its core, Fischer’s novel is dystopian: The government owns all the TV networks, and, as the FSF pursues the two men, the president implements a 72-hour Internet shutdown. Everett laments that all George Orwell “got wrong was the exact year” in 1984. But Fischer’s setting is not a post-apocalyptic or near-future world—it’s modern-day. Many readers will relate to the fears at play: the threat of martial law, a crumbling economy and the idea that a foreign threat has been manufactured. There’s a hefty amount of action, as well, as Bannister and Everett race to the Canadian border to find a man who’s broadcasting anti-government messages. Meanwhile, the FSF and the Department of Homeland Security try to freeze others out of an investigation of passenger-train bombings and push the CIA and FBI into becoming allies, creating a civil war, of sorts, among U.S. agencies. The technology does seem a bit dated—for example, a “sophisticated recording system” uses cassette tapes, and no one thinks to make a digital copy—but it doesn’t diminishes the story or its rock-solid ending.
A concise but considerable thriller, and a fine companion piece to the author’s similarly themed debut.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0615368382
Page Count: 314
Publisher: The Grove Point Press
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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