A sprawling but sporadically engrossing ecothriller from old- pro Cox (Park Plaza, 1991, etc.). Here, Somali poachers who've been wreaking systematic havoc on Kenya's protected wildlife plan a climactic coup during a rare total eclipse of the sun. Sally Facetti, a handsome young consular official at the US Embassy in Nairobi, has a full plate. Colonel Tom Keen, the legation's military attachÇ, has shown her satellite photos detailing the damage done indigenous elephant herds by the armed and dangerous gang of ivory hunters; meanwhile, a Peace Corps volunteer with an influential mom has gone missing in the bush; and Sally's been assigned to wetnurse an American astronomer in country with a demanding tour group for the eclipse. The stargazer is slated to set up camp at a hinterland farm owned by the Cawstons, a settler family with troubles of their own. With the patriarch (once a white hunter) dying, his son Rory and widowed daughter Sophie can't agree about whether to turn the vast acreage into a commercial game preserve or to keep raising cattle on it. Helpful Sally devises a mixed-use plan that could attract funding from environmental groups and support from the Kenyan government. The resourceful scheme gains her the respect of manly Rory, but Sally must still deal with a Wildlife Minister whose venal half-brother is in league with the well-equipped raiders who've been pillaging the poorly policed interior. Though tracked by Rory and Keen, the poachers reach their primary objective, a herd of rhinos temporarily penned up on Cawston property, slaughtering the animals for their horns at the height of the eclipse. A manhunt ensues, and only one marauder escapes the dragnet. Withal, Sally gets Rory (whose unhappy wife leaves him at a decidedly opportune juncture), and there's a sense that First Worldlings can save Kenya's treasures from a feckless populace. Cox keeps the pot boiling merrily until the disappointingly tame close, when he seems in a hurry to depart the exotic locales he's so vividly rendered.
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-13966-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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 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
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