Notable mostly for the digs at a CIA agent remarkably similar to Valerie Plame.
Griffin returns to chronicle the international adventures of heroic presidential special agent Charley Castillo (The Hostage, 2006).
Too modest and too rich to be just another rampaging Ollie North, Major C.G. “Charley,” polyglot love child of a German newspaper heiress and an even richer Texas aviator, has been charged by his doting president with the formation of a special-operations group answering only to the White House. The president wants Charley to clear up the mess left behind when he and his ragtag band of straight-shooting marines, honest CIA operatives, brainy Asian F.B.I. agents and their admiring Argentine opposite numbers located and almost snatched the perfidious high-level U.N. bureaucrat who absconded to rural Uruguay with 16 million dollars rightfully belonging to an international ring of oil-for-food swindlers. The snatch of the bureaucrat had been foiled by a black-clad gang of seemingly unidentifiable “Ninjas” armed with untraceable weapons, one of whom took out the bureaucrat even as Charley was reaching for him. The Ninjas were all wiped out, but the oil-for-food thieves want their money back and they want equally to eliminate anyone with clues about their identity, especially elderly Hungarian man-about-town and ace reporter Eric Kocian, a favorite of Charley’s. Armed with the disputed 16 million bucks snatched from the late bureaucrat’s secret accounts, girded with a promotion to Lt. Colonel and staffed with the best office administrator on the planet, Charley rounds up his troops and swears them into the new unit and off they fly in Charley’s Gulfstream, back and forth from Argentina to Germany to Hungary to Texas to Argentina to Uruguay, accompanied on much of the trip by Kocian’s huge and adorable Flemish sheepdog, until they at last clear up most of the mysteries, leaving just enough unsolved for a sequel.
Notable mostly for the digs at a CIA agent remarkably similar to Valerie Plame.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2007
ISBN: 0-399-15379-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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