Vintage Cussler (Crescent Dawn, 2010, etc.), and just right for the armchair techie who likes his action nonstop and his...
In Cussler’s latest, this time with Brown co-authoring, an African dictator decides he gets no respect, and so woe betide the world.
Djemma Garand, head of state in Sierra Leone, has big plans for his small country, which he feels has been dissed quite as much as he himself has been. Minerals, precious metals and docile geopolitical behavior, historically that’s been the Sierra Leone pigeonhole. Garand has vowed to change all that: “He desired a legacy that would leave his people better off for all eternity.” Garand may be a borderline megalomaniac, but since he’s no fool he understands the difference between a dream and a scheme. To accomplish his grandiose goal, he knows he needs leverage, the kind inherent in a particularly fearsome weapon, for instance, an item his own scientific community has been unable to develop. As a consequence, an international super scientist finds himself snatched off a street in Geneva and forced to experiment at the point of a gun. Meanwhile, Kurt Austin and his NUMA (National Underwater Maritime Agency) colleagues have been bearing witness to some unsettling events. In the Atlantic, not far from the Azores, a Japanese cargo ship bursts into flames. Badly wounded and obviously helpless, it’s a rich, sitting duck of a prize, custom-tailored for the opportunistic predator. So, it’s hardly a surprise when a pirate speedboat hones in, but then it, too, suddenly self-destructs. Coincidence? No seasoned NUMA professional believes that for a moment, but at this point not even the astute Kurt Austin is in a position to perceive the manipulative hand of Garand at work. But when he is it will be almost too late to save the world. Almost.
Vintage Cussler (Crescent Dawn, 2010, etc.), and just right for the armchair techie who likes his action nonstop and his characters uncomplicated. Nuance-seekers look elsewhere.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-15782-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
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