This first installment chronicling the adventures of Maj. Jacob Kelly turns out to be an undisputed success.
An Air Force pilot with a few skills not in his official dossier finds himself on the run in a hostile nation in the first thriller of this trilogy.
It’s 1986, and Maj. Jacob “Falcon” Kelly is at the top of his game. A capable fighter jock, Kelly gets recruited into a top-secret program that requires more than just flight abilities. These proficiencies, as well as the fluency in Russian he kept secret from the Air Force to avoid intelligence postings, come in handy when he is shot down over the Bering Strait and whisked off to a debriefing center deep inside the Soviet Union for interrogation and eventual liquidation. He befriends a fellow Russian-speaking prisoner named Oswald Simmons (“everyone just calls me Oz”), a scientist, and they use Morse code to secretly communicate. Before long, Kelly spots an opportunity to flee. He tells Oz about his escape plan: “Gonna check out and find a different hotel. Don’t care for the amenities here.” Oz eagerly offers the dubious Kelly his assistance (“Need some help with your luggage? Take me with you! I can be handy in a scrap”). Soon all of Kelly’s talents and knowledge that the Soviets didn’t know about get used against them, as the body count spirals upward and he comes ever closer to achieving his goal. Cobb (Falcon Strike, 2014, etc.) has clearly done his research on multiple counts and, like Tom Clancy or Dale Brown, masterly intertwines military technology and behavior into a tightly plotted narrative in which every development follows logically and smoothly from what came before. This deft touch extends to the characters: Kelly, while remaining supremely adept, makes mistakes and gets frustrated in his efforts to run, making him more relatable than a stereotypical Special Forces operative. And the primary antagonists, such as Maj. Gen. Chernikov, are not cartoonishly evil monsters but professional military figures with doubts and misgivings of their own. Occasionally, Cobb slips in a little heavy-handed religious material, but except for one instance where a professor’s conversion story told to Kelly edges into proselytizing, the author manages to keep most of the Christian-themed material relevant to the story and characters.
This first installment chronicling the adventures of Maj. Jacob Kelly turns out to be an undisputed success.Pub Date: June 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9848875-1-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doorway Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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