A vivid portrait of the last days of the corrupt Nationalist regime in China, by a former reporter clearly familiar with the terrain. Topping (Journey Between Two Chinas, 1972) sets his first novel in 1949, in the final months before the collapse of the Nationalist regime under Chang Kai-shek. Protagonist Eric Jensen, a young American in love with all things Chinese, is teaching in Peking while writing a book on the ancient philosophy of Taoism. Contemptuous of the violent Nationalists, who are increasingly isolated from the Chinese people, he holds out hope that the Communists will bring stability and freedom to the harassed and ill-fed Chinese. His admiration for China attracts the attention of the fledgling CIA, who pressure him into serving as a go-between who can carry American diplomatic initiatives to the Communists. His life is further complicated when he’s recruited by the Communists in the extremely dangerous negotiations going on to insure that the Nationalist general in charge of Peking will surrender the city without a bloody door-to-door battle. Part of the reason Eric agrees to cooperate is his growing love for Li-nan, a student working with the Communists to spare her country from further devastation. Eric’s efforts quickly draw the attention of the lethal Nationalist secret police. And, when matters begin to veer out of control, the CIA seems inclined to silence him as well. Topping, who covered the civil war for the New York Times, gives a convincing portrait of the fall of the Nationalists: his descriptions of battlefields, devastated towns, and the privileged life of foreigners in old China as it gives way to the new have a spare, powerful conviction. His characters can be less convincing; Li-nan is admirable but one-dimensional, and Eric, is an often surprisingly unreflective student of Taoism, more given to action than to analysis. Still, Topping’s obvious fascination with China and his ability to propel a complex plot make for an absorbing, if somber, thriller.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-891620-35-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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