A grizzled mountaineer and his friends take extreme measures to prevent a shady road-building project.
While enjoying a meal at his favorite diner, 70-year-old mountaineer, conservationist and scholar Jake McCann is approached by Janis Parker, a young activist with a Tahoe-based environmental group. Janis wants to talk about some rumors that have been circulating about plans for a new road that will cut through—and damage—Jake’s beloved Sierra Nevada wilderness. At first Jake, who is no stranger to being on the long-odds side of various ecological conflicts through the years, dismisses the rumors, but after a chance encounter with a couple of surveyors in the mountains, he realizes that something is going on. With the help of Janis, Jake’s Paiute friend, Storm Eagle, and a few other local activists, Jake, who is more like a force of nature than an elderly man, goes to great lengths to stop construction and protect the pristine wilderness. But powerful forces are behind the project, which may involve more than just a road, and soon people standing in the way of “progress” are dying. Written in vibrant prose and set largely in the vividly evoked beauty of the rugged Sierra Nevada mountains, Cosgrove’s novel presents tense action sequences and tender evocations of the natural world with equal aplomb, and often in rapid succession. While the evil developers and crooked politicians are essentially straight out of central casting, the environmentalists here are not stereotypical tree-hugging intellectual weaklings. Jake and Storm Eagle are rough men ready and able to use violence—and occasionally to kill—in order to protect the environment they love. This may not sit well with all readers, who may see such violence as extreme, but the characters themselves are well-wrought. Like its protagonist, the book is at its best in the untamed woods and mountains of the High Sierra, a setting that springs to life here. A tense, sometimes violent, but satisfying ecological thriller.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460930946
Page Count: 369
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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