Amped action and layered characters enhance this commendable second installment.
Electra Kittner uses her superior intellect to help the president of 22nd-century America combat a virus and terrorists in the continuation of Ratza’s (The Girl with the Lightning Brain, 2018) sci-fi series.
Twenty-one-year-old Electra is the sole survivor of a helicopter crash. As part of a secret operation in the U.S., the helicopter had been transporting individuals with data on the Techno-Plague virus, which triggers rapid onset of dementia. Though the crash severely injures Electra and causes amnesia, she gradually regains her faculties—but she won’t let everyone know how much has come back. Years ago, lightning struck her pregnant mother, giving Electra her name and “lightning brain” (superior intelligence and strength as well as T-Plague immunity), and she’s long suppressed her skills for fear of others’ unfavorable response. When the Guardian Party overthrows the current administration, Jared Gardner is the new U.S. President. Electra, whose leaks on T-Plague projects at the National Institutes of Health (where she was employed) helped secure Jared’s current position, becomes his covert adviser and speechwriter. This affords her some control to find a T-Plague vaccine and thwart terrorists intent on deploying the virus as a weapon. Meanwhile, physical assaults from terrorists unleash her “Monster”—her often brutal retaliation. Ratza’s follow-up is an improvement over the series’ first now that the lead is evolving. For example, Electra struggles to feel empathy, which adds vulnerability to a character with seemingly indestructible brainpower and strength. She also learns more about her late parents courtesy of relatives she meets for the first time. Despite copious discussions on the T-Plague or terrorist activities, the story has a steady pace and frequently showcases Electra’s physical aptitude (“She sidestepped the thrust, using his arm for leverage and swinging him three hundred and sixty degrees, then throwing him down the stairs”). The ending offers resolution for at least one subplot and a fantastic cliffhanger that will leave readers yearning for the next book.
Amped action and layered characters enhance this commendable second installment.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Stonewall Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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