A superfluous but entertaining sideline to the current zombie craze that nicely complements Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival...
A neurodevelopmental biologist with the Centers for Disease Control gets down with the sickness when he’s tasked to investigate the roots of a zombie apocalypse.
Lately in pop culture, coverage of zombies has shifted toward the burlesque with movies like Zombieland and novels like S.G. Browne’s Breathers. But usually, authors chase the Max Brooks money, aping his innovative oral history World War Z. Here, Schlozman (Psychiatry/Harvard Univ.) marries his interest in science and the undead to a gruesome but convincing relic from a humanity-killing plague. The book purports to be a copy of the handwritten notes of Dr. Stanley Blum, a scientist tasked to study zombie biology. By this point, the world has been decimated by a new virus—Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency Syndrome, or ANSD for short. Blum is sent, along with Sarah Johnson, a Scottish specialist in brain infections, and Jose Martinez, the chief forensic pathologist for New York City, to a creepy lab dubbed “the Crypt,” on a small island in the Indian Ocean, in order to dissect the walking dead and record the findings. At first, Blue is chillingly clinical in his notes. “We need to study the hypothalamus, especially as it relates to the rest of the brain structures,” he writes. “This is a primitive region of the brain that, among other things, tells us whether we’ve eaten enough. Zombies never seem to have eaten enough.” But as the horror escalates, even Blum starts to grasp the situation. “We’re dissecting crocodiles…crocodiles that used to be human. We’re dissecting monsters.” It’s a slim volume, but Schlozman weaves a frightening scenario, and horror fans will admire illustrator Sparacio’s grisly drawings of the disease’s progress.
A superfluous but entertaining sideline to the current zombie craze that nicely complements Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide.Pub Date: March 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-56466-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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