An intensely drawn fictional study of an explosive issue.
A military psychologist deployed to Guantanamo Bay is dismayed by the brutal treatment of prisoners.
Capt. Thomas Phillips is a psychologist in the National Guard assigned to Guantanamo Bay, partly on the basis of his experience dealing with Muslim prisoners within the Rhode Island Department of Corrections. Initially, his principal challenge is his own isolation and the morale of his fellow serviceman—the tedium of the passing days and the separation of family is a constant burden. Phillips takes to fishing and exercise as diversions and excitedly waits for emails from his mother and fiancee. He grows discomfited by the treatment of the detainees, subjected to restrictive shackles, food deprivation euphemistically labeled hunger strikes, overmedication, and other manner of “environmental manipulation.” Debut author McMackin displays impressive restraint in allowing Phillips’ revelations to slowly unfurl, investing them with a palpable power. A prisoner captured in Afghanistan, Hassan al-Abdi, believed to have valuable intelligence linking Iraq and the Taliban, requests a meeting with Phillips, who is then cajoled into becoming a participant in his increasingly aggressive interrogations. The justification to forcibly extract information from al-Abdi only increases as the American invasion of Iraq looks more like a foregone conclusion. Phillips is caught between the satisfaction of his duty and the moral responsibility he feels to al-Abdi, who reveals himself to be far too complex a person to be captured by villainous caricature. McMackin’s chief strength is the depth of his characterizations. He explicitly avoids the depiction of straw men in an effort to limn the murkiness of the moral situation Phillips confronts. The prose is plain, unembellished by literary invention, but serves as a good vehicle for Phillip’s thoughtful pragmatism. The plotline is a familiar one, even formulaic and shopworn, but nonetheless executed skillfully and provocatively. And since the topic is one that refuses to vanish from contemporary public debate—the moral defensibility of coercive interrogations—the story still seems fresh and relevant, despite its familiarity.
An intensely drawn fictional study of an explosive issue.Pub Date: April 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-985670-57-0
Page Count: 210
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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