Scarrow again provides a vivid sense of history and several believable scenes of maritime action, and his righteous but...
In their sixth adventure (The Eagle’s Prey, 2005, etc.), centurion comrades Cato and Macro go to sea to recapture stolen scrolls invaluable to the emperor Claudius.
After his crew takes control of three Roman ships, bloodthirsty Greek pirate Telemachus hones in on Caius Caelinus Secundus, a patrician who promises him a rich ransom. Inside the elegant chest Caius is transporting are scrolls whose importance he tries to play down. Telemachus isn’t fooled; he holds the patrician and the scrolls hostage, demanding ten million sestertians for their return. Meanwhile, back in Rome, seasoned centurion Macro and his young protégé Cato are adrift. Living in squalor while seeking a new commission, they wander into trouble because of their restlessness and anxiety. Salvation comes from an unexpected quarter. Claudius’s right-hand man, Narcissus, well-acquainted with the centurion duo, hires them to retrieve the scrolls. In a surprising twist, he puts Cato at the head of the rescue party and demands that the hotheaded but much more experienced Macro stay behind. Macro is unexpectedly reunited with his mother Portia, who abandoned him as a baby. (Their reunion and subsequent interactions are awkward, to say the least.) Cato’s meeting with Telemachus goes less well than expected. Not to be intimidated, the Greek speaks slickly of other bidders for the scrolls, which contain secret revelations from the famed Oracle at Delphi. Narcissus decides to seize them by force, putting Macro and Cato under the command of Vitellius, an old adversary with ruthless political ambition. Storms at sea weaken their fleet, making it more vulnerable to the battle-ready pirate force. The centurions almost immediately come to loggerheads with Vitellius, fearing that his inexperience and recklessness will make them easy prey for Telemachus.
Scarrow again provides a vivid sense of history and several believable scenes of maritime action, and his righteous but flawed protagonists are winning heroes.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-32454-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
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