A rousing sequel to the prolific Griffin's Honor Bound (1994), which introduced Cletus Howell Frade, a US Marine Corps fighter pilot (born in Argentina to an American mother) on assignment for the OSS in WW II Buenos Aires. This time out, Clete heads back to neutral Argentina in the spring of 1943 after an extended leave spent with his maternal grandfather, an autocratic oil tycoon. Ostensibly returning to bury his father (a wealthy colonel assassinated by Nazi agents fearful that he might overthrow the Castillo regime and take Argentina to war on the side of the Allies), Clete remains under orders from the cloak-and-dagger crowd. His mission: to keep a noncombatant vessel from using Argentina's coastal waters to rearm and refuel German U- boats on patrol in the South Atlantic. Fluent in Spanish, the personable young leatherneck moves in the capital city's highest social and military circles. While scheming how to do his duty without causing an international incident, Clete is tipped off by a Luftwaffe chum attached to the Third Reich's embassy that the supply ship will be carrying a massive amount of money earmarked to establish Nazi brass in postwar South America. A member of his undercover team also learns of a big-money racket whereby Jews may be ransomed from European death camps and resettled in Latin nations like Uruguay. With time out to put his flying skills at the disposal of insurgent Argentinean officers (whose ranks include Juan Domingo Per¢n) in their successful coup, and to help plan a wedding that will unite him with the high-born se§orita he has made great with child, Clete finds a way to turn the tables on the villainous Nazis without upsetting any diplomatic applecarts; and he manages also to exact a satisfactory measure of revenge for the untimely death of his father. An immensely entertaining adventure set in an equally intriguing milieu.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-399-14190-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
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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