An entertaining, immersive jaunt with a formidable protagonist.
In this short story, Keating’s (Reagan Country, 2018, etc.) recurring cleric Stephen Grant steps up to help a popular comic-book creator targeted by armed assailants.
Grant, the pastor at St. Mary’s Lutheran Church on New York’s Long Island, agrees to attend a locally held comics convention with assistant pastor Zack Charmichael. The first night of the event involves a lifetime achievement award ceremony for writer and artist Wes Jenkins, whose work Zack greatly admires. Zack and Stephen’s after-dinner encounter with Wes and his wife, Kelly, turns out to be fortuitous for everyone when Stephen, a former Navy SEAL and CIA operative, thwarts would-be killers brandishing shotguns. The attack may be a reaction to Wes’ recent article criticizing the comic industry’s leftist slant. Wes, who co-founded J&H Comic Publishing with Simon Huck, says that he just wants to tell good stories, but some have taken exception to his work’s apparent conservatism, sometimes expressed through biblical allegories. Protesters make their presence known during the con’s next two days. When kidnappers eventually abduct someone, Stephen is quickly on their trail, and he has plenty of help—a convention’s worth of superheroes. The series’ protagonist remains a man of action even though the story isn’t novel-length. This relatively short piece is lighter in tone than previous outings, due mainly to its concentration on the cheery setting. Keating respectfully portrays the con as a mostly enjoyable experience—even though Zack is the only true comic-book aficionado. The story’s point of view is unmistakably conservative, but it doesn’t portray some characters’ extreme views as being typical leftist beliefs. Despite the story’s brevity, it manages to flesh out new characters, such as Wes and Kelly, although the mystery isn’t too difficult to puzzle out. Much of the comedy is appropriate to the setting, as when people assume that the pastors’ clerical garments are costumes honoring the real-life comic-book series Preacher.
An entertaining, immersive jaunt with a formidable protagonist.Pub Date: June 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-71888-161-7
Page Count: 82
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
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