Tense pages hard-focused on aerial hardware as Brown pumps it up for fans—who know what they’re getting.
Old Dog Brown brings back his favorite technothriller heroes for what will likely be their 15th consecutive assault on the bestseller list, despite ever more unwieldy plots, laboriously detailed fantastic weapons, and bombastic action sequences.
Forcibly retired US Air Force General Patrick McLanahan (Wings of Fire, 2002, etc.) and his unsanctioned Night Stalker special ops corps of freelance commandos (who work outside the government) have saved the world several times over from total destruction and always win the biggest stakes on the table. What is an Air Battle Force? Well, former child prodigy aeronautical and space engineer Jon Masters has devised the Vampire bomber, which carries StealthHawk Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles within it. McLanahan leads the 1st Vampire Squadron, and StealthHawks are the leading edge of the force he and Wing Commander Rebecca Furness use to launch a counterattack against Afghan Captain Wakil Mohammad Zarazi’s Taliban troops, who capture a UN Afghan Relief and Rehabilitation unit in Northern Afghanistan. Air Battle Force is the future of air warfare and in part consists of robot warplanes launched from the Vampire bomber. Flying a B-1 over air space congruent to Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan, McLanahan loses a robot plane and goes searching for it through various hostile radars and air defense systems while running almost on empty. As it happens, the Turkmenistan oil fields have become the prime target of Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces no longer safe in Afghanistan. The novel bomber makes a pancake landing, skipping off the ocean onto a beach. The technoclimax comes with the Vampire in a dogfight while attacking an airbase in the Russian Federation.
Tense pages hard-focused on aerial hardware as Brown pumps it up for fans—who know what they’re getting.Pub Date: May 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-009409-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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
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
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