The sixth semioccult in the Nicholas Linnear series dances between generations, summons up characters from earlier novels, and deals with time past almost like Proust. Nietzschian superman Mick Leonforte murders the brutal Vietnamese husband of gorgeous Giai Kurtz, then in a Tokyo restaurant shows Giai the black Damascus steel blade with which he dispatched her husband for her. ``Dipped in a bottle of Chateau Talbot '70, his favorite wine and vintage,'' he tells her. Yes, the East!—where life can be sped to oblivion with great style. Mick heads an American Mafia family bent on wresting control of the Japanese underworld from Mikio Okami, Kaisho of the Yakuza (The Kaisho, 1993; Floating City, 1994) and the elderly great personal friend of Nicholas Linnear, whose father, Colonel Linnear, with the US Occupation Forces back in 1946, helped Okami get the Yakuza on its feet again by establishing the black market and also came between the rival Mafia forces of the Leonfortes and the Mattaccino family. Today, Black Paul Mattaccino carries on a half-century rivalry with the Leonfortes and the Yakuza. Why did Colonel Linnear help the Yakuza? Because the underworld is the keel of Japanese society and keeps the government and big business in balance. Now, Nicholas's Japan-based Tomkin Industries is helping Japan launch the TransRim CyberNet, based on his secret cellular phone that transmits astoundingly clear pictures of the speakers, can do a half-dozen other operations, and will monopolize Japanese electronics industries. But someone has been stealing the secret CyberNet data, and Lew Croaker, the detective with a biomechanical hand, returns to help Nicholas. The rivalry between generations climaxes with its birth back in the late 40's when John Leonforte, his crushed face remade by plastic surgery, becomes Leon Waxman but is outwitted by Colonel Linnear during the blackmailing of a McCarthy-like senator. As Lustbader creates a complex, giant microchip of a story, mere human readers enjoy sunrises of sexbliss and move like deathproof titans through a plot that bounces like a pinball from Tokyo to New York to West Palm Beach. Vacation fun.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-86810-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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