With his finger firmly placed on soldiers’ wartime experiences, the author delivers a potent, thrilling collection of...
A group of stories provides military melodrama and trouble galore.
Dedicated to “those in peril on the sea,” Hess’ (Unloaded, 2016, etc.) atmospheric and moody collection of 16 war-themed tales offers characters who find plenty of danger all on their own. The impressive title story, which takes place aboard the USS San Jacinto, seems drawn straight from a fictional Navy man’s journal. The first-person narration brings readers to the battle stations of a ship at the mercy of storms, death, and long months at sea yet concludes with a homecoming saluting the fierce allegiance, pride, and American patriotism of the armed forces. When two shipmates quarrel in the striking tale “Last Battle Aboard the Old Pro,” the outcome is violent and unexpected. Through authentic dialogue and jagged details, Hess’ stories become effective snapshots of military life, including its unsavory aspects as well as the provocative ones. This occurs best in the daring, crass, sexually charged game of “Smiles” enjoyed among randy crewmates docked on Philippine soil, where a soldier preparing to leave on honorable discharge winds up dissatisfied with the prostitutes who shimmy around him “as if they are sandwiches in a vending machine.” Elsewhere, the unpredictable chaos of military duty dominates: ships are tossed around amid rough seas; death saturates a Navy crew with the mere unlatching of a watertight engine room hatch; and the unforeseen suicide of a lieutenant discovered by a smitten soldier in “Here Today, Guam Tomorrow” proves a painful coda to a hardscrabble story about finding human connections on the Pacific island. The physical and mental fallout from war for soldiers is palpable in less contemporary tales like “Strong to Save,” set in 1949, and the racially charged “Attention on Deck,” in which a white Navy man in 1972 witnesses hate and anger from a group of black sailors eager to settle the score. Tension is at its highest in the exhilarating “Cash for G_d,” in which a desperate ex–Navy sailor holds up a grocery store at gunpoint, with the result ending up much bloodier than he’d anticipated. Cohesively rough and edgy, Hess’ heady volume should appeal to fans of military suspense as well as readers who want a generous slice of hardened Navy SEAL action stocked with grizzly servicemen doing the best they can.
Pub Date: May 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943402-82-3
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Down & Out Books
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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