by William J. Caunitz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1993
Another sprawling report from the NYPD, this one tracing the cross-plotted attempts of two divisions to infiltrate a world-class heroin gang. Intelligence's man on the inside is Irish/Mexican lounge-singer Alejandro Monahan, who's been spending most of the years since his cop father was gunned down cultivating dope king Che-Che Morales—so successfully that Che-Che, who considers himself both his patron and his blood brother, doesn't see anything suspect about Alejandro's plan to airlift drug shipments over New York using the state-of-the-art Parapoint delivery system. Meanwhile, though, the boys in Narcotics, who have no idea that Intelligence has its own man in Morales's gang, pluck rookie Fiona Lee from the ranks and send her for a crash- training course at the Hacienda, a training facility in the Blue Ridge where, identifying herself as Belle Starr, she meets Alejandro, calling himself Jesse James. After Alejandro's been flown down to his Mexican hometown so that he can demonstrate the Parapoint system while Che-Che's intimidating his family, it's back to the Big Apple, where the two undercover cops will inevitably meet again and pursue a chaste romance as their apoplectic division chiefs take turns pulling out the rug from under each other to the accompaniment of falling bodies, many shot by sexy, uninhibited mob assassin Judith Stern, code-named Cleopatra. It's that kind of book. Under layers of procedural detail and telling anecdotes, the story is both overgalvanized and meandering—a far cry from One Police Plaza (1984). But Caunitz's novel view that druglords are only the triggermen for the Man's interdepartmental squabbles could sell big copies. (First printing of 75,000)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-517-57498-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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