Exclamation-point-happy Cussler (Raise the Titanic!) is in zesty form here, inflating a balloon of nonsense that maintains a steady, technological-comic-strip interest. It's 1989, the US is energy-broke (dependent on Quebec's resources), and Navy Commander Heidi Milligan—30, divorced, survivor of a hysterectomy and an affair with an admiral twice her age—discovers a 1914 note to British P.M. Herbert Asquith from Woodrow Wilson, who laments a lost North American Treaty between England and America. And who is Heidi's new lover? None other than Dirk Pitt, hero of Cussler's underwater-salvage series, who's been secretly scuttling about the North Atlantic in his fantastic submersible, the Doodlebug, finding a ten-billion barrel oil deposit in the waters off Quebec. So Heidi tells Pitt about the missing treaty, copies of which were being carried, in 1914, by two diplomats—both of whom were mysteriously killed, the treaty copies sinking (one in the Hudson, one in the St. Lawrence). And what was in the treaty? Well, folks, Britain had sold Canada to the US for one billion dollars, to help finance defenses against Germany! So now the US president orders Pitt to salvage the lost treaties (remember that Quebec energy problem), and Pitt mounts both underwater operations at once. After excruciating—and quite exciting—recovery work in the sunken ship in the St. Lawrence, the treaty copy there proves to be mush. So it's off to the sunken train in the Hudson. But the train isn't there: it was diverted into an empty quarry and sealed there with its gold shipment, making quite a museum piece when Pitt finds it with its mummified passengers. The treaty is found at last, however, and so the president can address the House of Commons and Senate in Quebec, announcing that our two countries have been one since 1914 (and now we can share in the oil boom). Utter folderol, but lots of zippy fun.
Pub Date: Aug. 3, 1981
ISBN: 0553277405
Page Count: 349
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1981
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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