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LION OF JUDAH

Name: LION OF JUDAH
Author: Victor Ostrovsky
ISBN: 0-312-10016-7

by Victor Ostrovsky ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 1993

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The disillusioned former Mossad officer who blew the whistle on his old organization (By Way of Deception, 1990—not reviewed) now gives us his first novel, about...a Mossad officer who goes it alone, disillusioned with the organization. When Shaby Talaat, a Syrian National Security middleman whom Mossad op Natan Stone's been running as Foul Play, lucks into a hot secret—that an agent called the Fox has been gathering and training members for a new Syrian-backed Palestinian terrorist unit whose mandate is to assassinate moderate Palestinians who are ready for peace talks with Israel—Natan moves swiftly to infiltrate the group and spike its plans. His masters at Mossad, however, have other ideas, since they have no objections to the assassinations. (In fact, Mossad, Natan learns in a particularly entertaining aside, had been perfectly willing to assassinate Jimmy Carter when the Camp David negotiations seemed to be giving away too much to the Egyptians.) So Natan goes off the books to place somebody (who, ironically, turns out to be Nadin, a notorious terrorist's daughter, and another free-lancer like himself) inside the Fox's lair—not realizing that Col. Karl Reinhart, the former Stasi terrorist head who's now working with the Syrians, is on to him and, eager to protect the mole he's had lodged in Mossad for years, plans to kill two birds with one Stone by fingering Natan as the mole. As his old comrades chase him all over Beirut, Paris, and The Hague, Natan has to figure out a way to safeguard Nadin without blowing her cover—at the same time identifying and exposing the real mole once and for all. Anybody who doubts he can do it all, and do it his way, hasn't spent much time among Israelis. Authentic, offbeat tradecraft and clever touches throughout make this worthwhile despite its unmemorable characters— including the hero—and chop-socky prose.

Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1993

ISBN: 0-312-10016-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.

After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).