Ice-T, rapper and one of the stars of Law and Order: SVU, tries his hand at crime fiction, with the help of co-writer Radcliff.
Marcus “Crush” Casey is paroled from Attica after serving 20 years on charges related to his leading the Vicetown Kings, a New York City gang. Gulliver Rono, his chief lieutenant, betrayed him to the authorities to take over leadership of the Kings. Now Crush wants revenge, but he’s been “schooled” in prison by the legendary “Mack D,” an autodidact intellectual. From Mack, he has soaked up the wisdom of nearly every deep thinker from Aristotle to Sun Tzu. Now Crush has contrived an elaborate plot to take vengeance on Rono and regain leadership of the Kings. Crush also wants to make the gang into something more than a rough bunch of dope “slangers.” Crush is intelligent and ruthless, but not a particularly likable protagonist, and the authors never make clear whether Crush intends to move the Kings into legitimate activities. Most of the action spins around the revenge quest against Rono and the co-opting of both the city’s prominent Hispanic gang, the Blood Devils, and its remorseless Asian gang, the Black Lotuses, a group involved in the sex-slave business. Crush may be down with supplying drugs, but he cannot stomach the brutal abuse of young girls. As Crush’s campaign moves toward its conclusion, readers learn there is more than one "playa" seeking his own brand of justice and more than one schemer pulling stings. While this vengeance tale is sometimes plagued by overly clichéd writing, the use of gangster slang lends an air of believability. It is, however, a relatively slow-moving crime caper, with much rationalization and philosophical musings apparently meant to add gravitas.
The open-ended conclusion suggests Crush may appear again. The snipers, flash grenades and car chases suggest Ice-T is readying a screen treatment.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2513-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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
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
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