A commendable thriller that makes its medical science riveting and exhilarating.
In Van Anderson’s (The Organ Takers, 2014, etc.) second series entry, Dr. David McBride evades police and a crazed Russian spy while trying to save a kidney patient’s life.
David is wanted by the New York City police after exacting revenge on the man responsible for his pregnant wife’s death. Another man, a rogue government agent known as “Mr. White,” previously blackmailed David into a scheme involving black market organs. White’s 26-year-old daughter, Heather, is currently dying from renal disease and needs a kidney transplant. He wants David to continue a dead surgeon’s research which involved growing new human organs from stem cells. In return, White claims that he can get David’s father, who’s suffering from dementia, better treatment. Unfortunately, Mikhail Petrovsky, formerly of Russia’s Federal Security Service, is also after the research, and he’s willing to resort to violent means in his mission to obtain a series of pertinent notebooks. He and his thugs target several people, including a biochemist who may have hidden the most essential notebook away. David and White race to protect those in danger and secure the research before the Russians do. This, of course, puts both of them in the line of fire—and the cops are still on David’s trail as well. The second installment of Van Anderson’s series ably expands on the previous installment’s story. Some new particulars regarding the enigmatic White, for example, make him a stronger, more intriguing character; for instance, the spy turns out to be better at surveillance than hand-to-hand combat, and as a result, he’s just as vulnerable as David is. The energetic narrative keeps its edge with a constant sense of threat: Heather has a limited amount of time left to live, and the cops and Russians pursuing David are sometimes a step ahead of him. As in the previous series entry, there’s plenty of medical terminology, but it’s generally comprehensible, as David explains much of it to White. Van Anderson also offers striking details, as when David vividly describes a gruesome wound that he suffered during the events of the last book.
A commendable thriller that makes its medical science riveting and exhilarating.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9907597-3-7
Page Count: 262
Publisher: White Light Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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