With help from an unlikely ally, a hard-boiled Israeli battles renascent fascists to a bloody standstill throughout Italy in another (his tenth) slick thriller from Easterman (The Night of the Apocalypse, 1995, etc.) Yosef Abuhatseria, a militant Sephardic Jew who served in one of Israel's elite antiterrorist units and later settled in the Occupied Territories, arrives in Sardinia at the request of his brother-in-law, a hotelier whose son Yoel has been abducted. Aided by Maryam Shumayyil, a comely Arab ÇmigrÇ who serves as his interpreter, the Moroccan-born Yosef manages to rescue the missing child from a mountain hideaway (leaving four bodies behind). There's no reunion, however, because unknown parties have brutally murdered Yoel's parents. After delivering the traumatized youngster to family members in Israel, Yosef is unofficially encouraged by Mossad to delve more deeply into the puzzling case. Further killings and several attempts on his life convince him that he's uncovered crucial pieces of a wide-ranging conspiracy. Having become ardent lovers under the threat of mortal perils, Yosef and Maryam evade their pursuers long enough to reach the mainland, where they join forces with a Jewish self-defense group in Turin. This band of irregulars has been gathering evidence against a revisionist historian on trial for claiming that the Holocaust never happened. His suspicions confirmed, Yosef is drawn into a deadly endgame that pits him against an aging SS officer bent on establishing a new, racially pure Reich throughout Europe. Having survived a lethal encounter with his neo-Nazi foes in the subterranean caverns that underlie Turin, however, Yosef finds that he's no longer capable of virulent hatred—for Palestinians or any other presumptive enemy. At the close, Yosef and Maryam leave for an uncertain future together. An absorbingly far-fetched tale that blends tomorrow-the-world villains with heroic protagonists. Notable for above-average complexities, exotic locales, and a wealth of slam-bang action.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-109206-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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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