Lustbader—Master of the Orient!—returns stronger than ever with the fourth of the Nicholas Linnear novels (The Ninja, 1980; The Miko, 1984; and White Ninja, 1990), with a fifth promised. Lustbader's dense approach to storytelling lets rich backgrounds support incredible plots and high-tension martial-arts battles. Here, he lavishes even more care than usual on bringing Tokyo, Venice, Paris, and Washington to a ringing life against which his stereotypes leap superhumanly and unload tons of Eastern expertise. Nicholas Linnear, co-owner of the Japan-based Tomkin- Sato electronics corporation, fights the recession by trying to expand the firm's base in Vietnam, where he hopes to make his phenomenal T-PRAM computer chip (it's based on the human brain structure) while being hit with attacks from McCarthy-like investigations by Senator Rance in Washington. Meanwhile, his wife, Justine, takes a passionate distaste for the Japanese following the death of their child and a miscarriage. In the middle of all this, the Kaisho (or Godfather of Japanese criminals) calls upon Nicholas to repay a moral debt incurred by his late father, who—when on General MacArthur's staff following WW II—enlisted the Kaisho's aid in jump-starting democracy in Japan. The Kaisho has moved in on the American Mafia—but an even superior Japanese criminal organization wants to kill the elderly Kaisho while forming a worldwide underworld conglomerate. The Kaisho trusts no one among his own people: Nicholas must find and destroy the assassin, despite his scorn for Yakuza. The assassin, the death-loving Du Doc—a mind-reading Vietnamese of fabulous fighting ability and access to occult areas of martial arts that Linnear himself must now master if he is to meet Du Doc head-on—is one of Lustbader's best villains, his wickedness woven with an erotic mastery that melts all women. Plunging melodrama and poppy dreams of supersex. Superior hokum.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-86806-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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
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
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