A modern morality tale of redemption, adventure, and survival.
In Cooper’s debut novel, a dying man in a nursing home breaks his silence to relate the story of his adventures aboard the Sweetie Pie, a modern-day pirate ship.
Richard Murray, aka Walter White, was in his 50s and living in San Francisco when his wife died. He let himself go, drinking too much and living on the bum. A job offer on the Sweetie Pie seemed a godsend at first, until he saw that the boat was tricked out to smuggle drugs and avoid the Coast Guard. At sea, he first realized he needed to escape when his two shipmates unceremoniously dumped the body of his predecessor overboard. After banging his head when the Sweetie Pie fled a confrontation with police, he used the wound as an excuse to take a dip in the water, i.e., abandon ship. The sea was far too cold to make a getaway by swimming, so he focused his attention on a rubber skiff tied to the stern. Eventually, White got away to Canada, taking a million dollars of the smugglers’ money with him. A wanted man without country, identity, or papers, he needed to launder the U.S. currency and establish some kind of life out of the limelight. Cooper skillfully uses White’s trials on the Sweetie Pie and in Canada to map his protagonist’s voyage from down and outer to wealthy recluse. Cooper provides detailed explanations of background facts, using hand-drawn sketches, scanned documents, and historical asides; he even calls things by their full and proper names, sometimes when unnecessary: e.g., “White Star Line’s H.M.S. Titanic.” At the same time, the simple, enlightening prose allows him to opine on everything from the evils of drugs to baseball players who dare copy Willie Mays’ basket catch, all while expounding on geography, endangered species, smuggling, and whatever else comes into his purview.
A modern morality tale of redemption, adventure, and survival.Pub Date: April 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4602-6150-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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