Next book

A SHORTAGE OF ENGINEERS

Dilbert with the gloves off (and pants down). Laugh-out-loud funny.

Hilarious corporate satire—or, how to succeed in aerospace engineering without really trying.

Engineer novelist Grossbach (Easy and Hard Ways Out, 1975, etc.) takes as his hero one Zack Zaremba. Zack may be new at International Instruments, but he has a feeling that the Air Force project he’s assigned to is a billion-dollar boondoggle. His part of the project: helping design a gizmo that can tell friend from foe electronically; it’s officially called an Advanced Interrogator/Receiver—AIR, for short. Zack’s colleagues: a rogue’s gallery of techie types, including Anton Meissner, pointy-headed project manager; Whispering Bill, Meissner’s graying, gravel-voiced yes man; Edouard Boulot, a fearless Frenchman with a silicon chip on his shoulder; Kushner, a nerd’s nerd and worrywart extraordinaire; Shopper Jim, a cynical philosopher of sorts; a Chinese head engineer dubbed “A Boy Named Hsu”; and Zack’s personal favorite, Lilah Li, a gorgeous Eurasian software expert who gets him hot and bothered every time she walks by. Some of his crazier co-workers are quick to assure Zack that his misgivings about a possible boondoggle are well-founded, but no one seems to care much. The Air Force brass overseeing the project are too dumb to know they’re being hoodwinked anyway. Zack gets through his days, completing the required busywork in record time and amusing himself with various mindgames and pointless calculations—until he decides to get a life, volunteers to coach a local kids’ soccer team, becomes Lilah Li’s hero (she’s a single mom with a son on the team) and, to his delight, her lover. Their lusty romance is interrupted when all hell breaks loose as it becomes clear that the AIR project was indeed bid with impossible-to-meet specs. A scapegoat is found—Edouard Boulot—and promptly fired. But Zack uncovers the real culprit before he himself learns the wisdom of Shopper Jim’s Rule #7: Always keep enough boxes under your desk to carry out your stuff.

Dilbert with the gloves off (and pants down). Laugh-out-loud funny.

Pub Date: July 13, 2001

ISBN: 0-312-27554-4

Page Count: 288

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001

Categories:

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 58


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 58


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

Categories:
Next book

JURASSIC PARK

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

Categories:
Close Quickview