A predictable tale of immigration that offers easy answers to complex questions about national identity and racial hatred.
Ding explores the roots of anti-immigrant racism in his debut novel.
Two men, Sam and Diego, grow up on opposite sides of the American dream. Sam is the son of a Detroit-area factory worker; Diego, the son of a Mexican immigrant in thrall to a drug cartel. Sam’s father loses his job when the factory closes, while Diego’s father struggles to free his family from a life of gang violence; Sam ends up xenophobic, and Diego, a ward of the state. The two describe their lives in alternating first-person accounts until Sam moves to San Diego, where he transforms into a hateful immigration-enforcement officer with epiphanies such as, “How could we let people just come over here and harass families?....And most weren’t violent? What about the ones that were?” Diego, meanwhile, takes up residence with a foster family that’s a caricature of rural dysfunction, including a tattoo-encrusted foster father named Zeke who beats him with belts and even a broomstick. Ding’s prose is clear and occasionally evocative. However, he sometimes succumbs to clichés (“He felt the stinging breath of Sebastian the Beast on his neck”) and overwriting (“It was an empty, dirty cave—a desiccated temple dedicated to the disheartened and disenfranchised men who forewent education for the promises of stability and a good wage”). The awkwardness of some sentences seems to have resulted from inadequate proofreading, as in “And I felt well-prepared to tackle it I.” Although attempting to expose the origins of racism is an admirable goal, many readers may find its insights obvious—for example, that anti-immigrant rage is often fueled by economic turmoil. In the end, the book becomes a passion play with characters that are mere functions of the narrative: Sam hates foreign people, Diego is one. The book’s climax, like San Diego itself, is visible from miles away.
A predictable tale of immigration that offers easy answers to complex questions about national identity and racial hatred.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500701680
Page Count: 218
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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