As always, Herman, a retired Air Force major, evokes his far-flung battlefields with colorful authenticity (The Trojan Sea,...
A routine thriller about our first woman president, who’s burdened by political, geopolitical, and pesky un-political problems.
She turns for help to the soldier she loves, too. Which goes to show how smart Madeline O’Keith Turner is, because Matt Pontowski—himself the grandson of a US president—is the very model of a modern major general. Brilliant, courageous, charismatic—and, until injured, the hottest of hot pilots—he’s Rambo gentrified. And to cope with the sea of troubles Maddy is beset by, he’ll need every bit of his vaunted firepower. Bad enough that Iraq, Iran, and Syria have joined in a secret alliance—the United Islamic Front—aimed at total control of Middle Eastern oil reserves. But what are the Chinese up to? Do they see Middle East unrest as an opportunity to have their way with a vulnerable, unguarded Asia? And is all this messing about prelude to a combined attack with the US as target? You bet it is, and Major General Matt, who’s as sweet on President Maddy as she is on him, buckles on his work clothes, ready to save the woman and the country he loves. Off he goes to Malaysia, where China’s People’s Liberation Army has begun serious incursions. At the head of his ad hoc group of special forces hard guys (men and women)—including a prime collection of Golden Oldie top-gun pilots with whom he’s gone to other wars—Matt takes on superior forces as only he can. In the meantime, back in “the Imperial City,” Maddy, too, is whittling away at powerful enemies, including one black-hearted senator with literary roots in 19th-century melodrama.
As always, Herman, a retired Air Force major, evokes his far-flung battlefields with colorful authenticity (The Trojan Sea, 2001, etc.). It’s his home-front warriors that seem pale and stale.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-620976-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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