Good work from a writer—never less than authoritative (The Ice Curtain, 2002, etc.)—who, with a little less techno and a bit...
A solid, Arctic-set technothriller in which a cold war—cold as icebergs—breaks out when a pair of inimical subs (one US, one Russian) take each other on.
Oh, that Baikal! Not only is the Russian sub humungous—big as an aircraft carrier—but it’s supposed to be defunct. Originally, six Typhoon class submersibles, Baikal and her sisters, were built by the Russians, their number steadily diminished by a variety of mishaps. And then there was one, which the US paid the Russians to scrap. “Those son of bitches took our money and kept the boat,” fumes the captain of the U.S.S Portland, the sleek nuclear sub that suddenly comes upon this formidable monster. In an act both rash and characteristic, Commander James Vann decides to pursue the Baikal and blow it out of the water if he can—never mind the very real risk of WWIII. Fortunately, there are some cooler heads on the Portland, belonging to Lieutenant Commander Willy Steadman, Vann’s exec, and Senior Chief Jerome Browne, the very model of a seasoned, savvy career enlisted man. Also on board , for the first time in US submarine history, is a woman: the pretty, plucky, and cool-headed Lieutenant Rose Scavullo, a crack Russian translator. Vann hates everything about her, including the aroma that stems from soap a tad more delicate than standard issue. Most of all, however, he hates the fact of her: an alien presence, he decrees, on what was obviously meant to be an all-boys bastion. Vann’s hunt for red Baikal persists, growing ever more obsessive until, it becomes clear to Steadman, Browne, and Scavullo, intervention is inescapable. Shades of Bligh and Queeg.
Good work from a writer—never less than authoritative (The Ice Curtain, 2002, etc.)—who, with a little less techno and a bit more thriller, might have nudged this up to outstanding.Pub Date: March 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-14935-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Steinbeck is a genius and an original.
Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.
This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936
ISBN: 0140177396
Page Count: 83
Publisher: Covici, Friede
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
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