by Stephen Hart ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 18, 2017
Characters debate more than act, but the novel astutely examines the Vietnam War.
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In Hart’s debut historical thriller, a secret group hopes to build a nuclear bomb that will force the government into ending the Vietnam War.
Arthur Weiss is the son of an Army colonel, but he still has no itch to volunteer for Vietnam, especially after his older brother, Tom, returns from the war in a body bag. In fact, at the University of Illinois, he helps fellow student Joshua Taylor evade police at an anti-war demonstration on campus, an act that has unexpected consequences. Joshua turns up murdered, and FBI Agent Vic Torkis is on the case. The agent’s immediate supervisor, Frank Bono, wants to link the murder to a group Joshua was actively involved in, Students for a Democratic Society. Bono also assumes Joshua, who is black, belonged to the Black Panthers. Potential dissension between SDS and the Panthers, Bono believes, could aid in blaming Joshua’s death on the latter and discrediting the organization. Months later, Arthur, now a chemist at the University of Notre Dame Radiation Laboratory, is contacted by Billie Lee, a woman who claims to have been friends with Joshua in Illinois. Due to her association with the late student, Vic’s keeping an eye on her—and soon watching Arthur as well. Billie Lee tells Arthur she belongs to a “very select group,” separate from SDS, with plans to build a nuclear bomb as a means to negotiate with the government to end the war. Arthur can use his skills (and lab) to convert uranium to plutonium, but before long, he has doubts regarding the group’s true motivation. Hart’s entertaining tale often plays like a soap opera. Vic is sure his wife, Cathy, is having an affair. He starts a pseudo-romance with Susie-Q, who works at a massage parlor, and is shocked when his daughter, Denise, wants to drop out of college. Arthur balances relationships with both Billie Lee and Donna Will, whom he meets at a student bar. Billie Lee is a sexually enticing, radical protestor, while Arthur sees himself settling down with Donna, who believes in ending the war peacefully. Nevertheless, Arthur’s dalliances render him less likable; seeing both women involves deceit, and Arthur shows no sign of remorse. There’s heavy political discourse throughout, and these extensive discussions consider various aspects of a nation at war, from racism in draft exemptions to the reason for the Vietnam War (imperialism, someone suggests). The narrative leaves little room for action, so while it’s abundantly clear that at least one individual remains in peril in the final act, the ending is a bit anticlimactic. Fortunately, Hart sprinkles in some humor: Arthur, having dropped acid (it’s the’60s, after all), hallucinates that President Richard Nixon is in his apartment, explaining why he won’t pull troops from Vietnam and making soup in a giant cauldron.
Characters debate more than act, but the novel astutely examines the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59330-688-5
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Aventine Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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