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 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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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