Gloomy, gory, and furiously critical of MacArthur, Brady's second take on the Korean War (after his 1990 memoir, The Coldest...
Taking a break from his fluffy satires of summering glitterati (The House That Ate the Hamptons, 1999, etc.), Parade and Advertising Age columnist Brady, delivers a bitter, despairing novel of the valiant but futile stand by US Marines against the Chinese Army at the Chosin Reservoir..
Having survived combat at Guadalcanal, US Marine Captain Tom Verity had had enough of war. In 1950, Verity, a widower with a three-year old daughter, looks forward to another semester teaching Chinese language at Georgetown when he's called back into uniform and sent to Korea. There, he's given a jeep, a fancy radio, a respectful, history-quoting Sergeant Tate, and the wisecracking, street-wise South Philadelphia driver Izzo. Ordered to head north, to the snowy Korean highlands bordering China, he is to listen to Chinese radio transmissions and determine if the they’re aiding Korean Communist forces. A pawn in a bureaucratic conflict between Marine commanders and General MacArthur, who has divided American forces along the Korea-Chinese border in anticipation of a quick end to the hostilities, Verity quickly discovers what the Marines have suspected and MacArthur refuses to believe: that the Chinese have mobilized to invade from the north. After an agonizing build-up, they attack in human waves, demolishing entire battalions before retreating into the snowbound hills. Verity, Tate, and Izzo fight their way through a series of devastating, gut-wrenching combat scenes, then join the remnants of the American forces on a humiliating retreat through punishing attacks and brutal cold. Their final, tragic (and somewhat unconvincing) response to so much wasted life is to make sure that one of their fallen comrades will not be left on foreign soil.
Gloomy, gory, and furiously critical of MacArthur, Brady's second take on the Korean War (after his 1990 memoir, The Coldest War) throws ice water on mindlessly gung-ho military thrillers, concluding that the only good things about war are the honor and decency of the few good men who fight it. (two pages maps, not seen)Pub Date: June 8, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26200-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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