Bleak and gritty, but thoroughly believable, especially the reporting scenes.
Fesperman’s experience reporting firsthand for the Baltimore Sun made The Small Boat of Great Sorrows (2003) the best thriller to come out of the Bosnian war; now, he goes to the Tribal Lands between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the last days of the Taliban.
There’s no way to soften the scenery in the godforsaken territory ruled by the Pashtun tribes and no story to tell from that part of the world that isn’t, if truthful, grim as death. Here the eponymous warlord’s son is Najeeb, the University of North Carolina–educated and now exiled son of an Afghan tough guy supporting himself as a reporter and translator in Peshawar, Pakistan’s gateway to Afghanistan. Cut off from his family for spilling secrets to Pakistan’s powerful secret police, Najeeb is hired as a local fixer by thrice-married and overexperienced American reporter Stan “Skelly” Kelly, freshly back in action after several boring years in the Midwest. Skelly needs Najeeb to accompany him as he follows one of the many Afghan strongmen of the moment returning to join the chaotic war on the Taliban theocracy. The translator’s attention to the job is compromised by his concern for Daliya, a university-educated 20-year-old woman sent to Peshawar by her family to rethink her attitude toward arranged marriages. Daliya and Najeeb have become lovers, placing themselves in mortal danger not only from the wrath of their families but also from the harsh judgment of their fundamentalist neighbors. Indeed, Najeeb has been receiving menacing letters quoting passages from the Koran. When Skelly and Najeeb’s reporting takes them across the border with a cutthroat whose interests are unclear, Daliya must flee Peshawar first to save her life, then to save her lover’s.
Bleak and gritty, but thoroughly believable, especially the reporting scenes.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41473-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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