An intriguing antihero’s perspective on his life and times.
A Korean War deserter tries to start over in a rapidly changing Florida in this novel.
Philip Narby doesn’t remember who he was. In an earlier lifetime, he was a behind-the-scenes paper-pusher in Occupied Japan. But he learned things he shouldn’t have about the illegal activities of the powers that be. For that, he got tortured and then sent to the front lines of the Korean War, where he was gravely injured. A military black marketeer used him as a mule for his ill-gotten gains and helped Narby flee to Cuba. Early on in the tale, the drug-addled Narby escapes Havana by boat when the people start turning against dictator Fulgencio Batista, and crashes ashore on Florida’s Gulf Coast, with thousands of stolen dollars in a rucksack. He’s accompanied by a young, idealistic medical student, through whom he funnels aid to Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries. Narby also invests in land in the region, building a primitive fortress in the jungle. He falls in lust with an abstract artist living in a nearby colony of the wintering wealthy. He also falls under the spell of jazz, even running a club in Miami’s black Overtown section. But Narby is really stuck between the worlds of the powerful and the faceless masses: “There were only two sides, now and forevermore: them, the jackals with generals’ stars, and the Harvard-suckled backstabbers and assassins, and us, the men who didn't matter, fodder left to rot in the swamps and the jungles and the shit-water ditches.” Narby’s adventures are a warped version of the American Dream, as he uses stolen funds to build a better life for himself and others. Yet he can’t enjoy it because his paranoia has him continually looking over his shoulder. Weisberg’s (Chronicles of Disorder, 2000) narrative is much like the protagonist’s life: while time passes quickly, significant events for Narby happen only occasionally. His indolent lifestyle wears thin over 600 pages. Furthermore, there are few characters worth rooting for. Narby means well, but his venomous thoughts and substance abuse bring him down. Still, it’s engrossing to watch one man founder in the midst of a turbulent period of history.
An intriguing antihero’s perspective on his life and times.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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