A thoughtful and powerfully written war novel.
A Confederate spy becomes caught between duty and love in this Civil War drama.
In 1863, Judson Walker, a Confederate captain and a member of the infamous Morgan’s Raiders, is sent to Furnass, Pennsylvania—deep in enemy territory—on a sensitive mission disguised as a Union officer. Jonathan Reid, an engineer, accompanies him. The two are tasked with determining if the road engines invented by Colin Lyle could be modified to make Gatling guns even deadlier, a technological innovation that could sway the outcome of the war. Walker does his best to keep up the ruse that he’s a Union soldier despite his Southern accent, since “if someone exposed him right now as a Southern spy,” there were people who “would probably run from their houses and beat him to death, tear him limb from limb for being a traitor.” Walker frets anxiously that Libby, Colin’s wife, suspects him—she too is a Southerner, originally from South Carolina, and quickly detects his accent—but he also begins to have irrepressible feelings for her that could compromise his operation. Meanwhile, Reid observes Walker’s growing attachment to Libby and is confronted with the possibility that he’ll have to take matters into his own hands. Snodgrass (All Fall Down, 2018, etc.) sensitively investigates the ways in which the lines between the North and South could be hazily drawn—Walker realizes that “by some definitions he was a Northerner himself.” Reid loathes Walker for his incarnate representation of everything wrong with the South, “the backwoods mentality, the backwater view of the world.” The author’s meticulous, measured prose is well-suited to his principal literary task: the depiction of ambiguity that resides in the interstices between heavy-handed extremisms. Walker is a grippingly complex character. An educated man—he’s a lawyer—he’s willing to risk his life for the South, but he’s hardly an ideological partisan. And Colin, too, is more layered than he at first seems—a scientific fanatic, he’s so committed to his invention he’s either incapable or unwilling to notice the electricity between Libby and Walker. But despite Colin’s professional commitments, he’s not coldly rational either: “Maybe that’s why I find machines easier to deal with than people. When a machine doesn’t do what you want it to, you simply make a new gear or whatever. Maybe someday we’ll be able to make one for the human heart.” Snodgrass artfully infuses the plot with tantalizing suspense that feels like a cord pulled taut that could break at any moment. This is not a formulaic rendering of the distance between the personal and the obligatory but something deeper and more profound. Walker’s burgeoning love for Libby compels him to re-evaluate the very nature of his obligations, as if his feelings produced a new clarity. The author’s impressive achievement is to upend the simplistic interpretation of the Civil War: two sides warring against each other out of perfectly confident and implacable hate.
A thoughtful and powerfully written war novel.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9997699-1-1
Page Count: 329
Publisher: Calling Crow Press
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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