Colombian druglords try to ship a billion in cash from Las Vegas to Mexico. The CIA, DEA, and FBI deploy dozens, spend millions, and launch the very latest in superspy ultralight planes to keep the money at home and teach the bad guys a lesson. Ing took technothrills to the tropics previously in The Ransom of Black Stealth One (1989). The technogizmo this time is Nemesis, a featherweight spy plane commissioned by the Coast Guard, capable of coasting on station miles above the earth for weeks at a time to keep an eye on the drug trade. Loaded with exceptionally keen-eyed TV cameras, computer-generated maps, and all the comforts of home, Nemesis is just one in Ing's enormous cast of characters that also includes confused vacationers, tiny pilots, FBI agents disguised in double- knit and drag, a Mormon archaeologist with an Indiana Jones complex, mystical Indians, and Peru's Shining Path guerrillas. All these interesting people and gadgets come together when the Colombian druglords—who have moved their operations to southern Mexico, taking with them the mad mountain Maoists—seek to solve their cash-flow problems by stuffing a billion in ill-gotten American gains in an ancient propjet. The plane is to be camouflaged with a load of unwitting Americans expecting a free flight to look at Mexican condos. American intelligence, however, is onto the plan from the beginning and implements a sting to divert the loot and thwack the Colombians where they live. The extraordinarily complex plan requires a stunt-double propjet, two of the wonderful spy planes, and the cooperation of a few culturally pre-Colombian Mayans. The enormous cast can be confusing, and the setup takes extraordinarily long—but the tone is light, the gimmickry supports the fun, and the chase, when it comes, is a ripsnorter.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-85105-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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