An honest, engaging tale of living through war.
In Taylor’s debut novel, the skies over Vietnam become a rite of passage for an American soldier.
Quiet and impressionable, 24-year-old Steve Mylder volunteers for a tour in Vietnam after graduating from the Colorado Air Force Academy and serving six months in a squadron in England. With little world knowledge beyond his Arizona youth and officer’s training, Steve comes of age in the midst of military life at Danang Air Base. The young lieutenant’s aircraft is an F-4C Phantom II, “a two-pilot plane with an aircraft commander in the front seat to do most of the flying and a pilot in the backseat to do almost everything except pilot. Steve was in the back.” Most of his buddies’ life goals amount to flying a tour over Vietnam–consisting of 100 counters, or missions–and returning for a second tour to become a front-seater. Others are more ambitious, like Mike Ross, Steve’s bunkmate, who dreams of becoming a U.S. senator, or wild man Avery Aughton, a future chief of staff who falls madly in love with a Vietnamese beauty who he spots while flying 50 feet overhead. The protagonist’s only future goal is getting out of Vietnam alive. Adhering to age-old superstitions, his lucky charm for survival is newly grown peach fuzz, an “invisible protomustache.” Mission after mission, Steve checks off his counters, spending nights submerged in poker and hijinks with his friends at the DOOM club bar, surviving rocket attacks on Danang and penning dispatches as a war correspondent for his hometown newspaper. Author Taylor, a veteran of Danang, brings personal authenticity to this fictional account of Vietnam air combat. From soldier’s soldier Col. Sanger to Maj. Scott, who makes the life-or-death decisions around here,” and sub-Lt. Sam, the base’s collie mascot, the book is studded with rich, often juxtaposing characters that touch on philosophical questions of war. There’s a vivid contrast between swaggering language and graceful, even prose, which is underscored with deep internal subtext. The author brings a balanced and original perspective to a genre too often dominated by the action.
An honest, engaging tale of living through war.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-595-46427-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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