Still smarting over the kid-glove coddling the Japanese got in Rising Sun? You'll love Hoyt's out-of-the-ballpark chauvinism as he fulminates against those three age-old Japanese cultural traditions: trade protectionism, white slavery, and baseball. As US President Harold Olofson, no genius but a stout- hearted statesman, presses Foreign Minister Masayuki Yoshida for long overdue trade concessions, his vice president's daughter, Linda Shive, is booking passage incognito on a tramp steamer on the latest leg of her Far Eastern getaway. Big mistake. Before you can say sayonara, the steamer has been boarded by pirates on suspiciously friendly terms with the captain, Linda's cover is uncovered, and so is the rest of her, as she's purchased for $2,000 by yakuza godfather Shoji Kobayashi and inducted into the ways of the japayuki—bondage, slavery, forced sex of every flavor. It's all captured on those handy Japanese camcorders so that videotapes can be sent to her father and, Kobayashi threatens, to newspapers all over the world if the president doesn't back down on his trade demands. Enter former CIA spook James Burlane, fresh from his triumph over terrorists in Red Card (1994). His mission: to penetrate the club culture where a gaijin sticks out like a white thumb, take out Kobayashi's murderous ring of henchpersons, rescue the damsel, administer summary justice to Kobayashi, and give Olofson's trade talks another chance. Assuming the identity of Sports Illustrated writer Darryl Lattimore, Burlane, who seems to be taking his moves from Ross Thomas's playbook, pretends to be writing an article on Japanese baseball in order to get close enough to Kobayashi (who just happens to own the Yokohama Bay Stars) to administer the coup de grÉce—slicing off one last Kobayashi digit for the way he mismanages his team. Deliriously xenophobic, irresistibly enjoyable.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85553-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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