Strong satisfactions without accenting heroics. Well done indeed.
Bond solos on this submarine story that sends a docked aviator to serve in a submarine.
This light melodrama tells of life on and the operation of a submarine. Lt. Jerry Mitchell, in his last week of naval flight training, finds his plane cartwheeling, and suffers such a severely broken arm that he’s to be cashiered when he asks to be transferred to submarine service. Trained on the Manta prototype, an information-seeking submersible, he’s assigned to the Memphis, a sub about to leave New London. The sub was to be decommissioned, but it has been given one last job: to go to Russian waters and check on hazardous radioactive waste the Russians have dumped underwater. Also on board are two women, Drs. Joanna Patterson and Emily Davis, both very knowledgeable engineers under the aegis of the president himself, who wants to present their findings at a forthcoming world environmental meeting. Assigned to manage the torpedo room, Mitchell has two heavy hands to deal with: Captain Hardy, who dislikes him for his political pull at getting his berth on the sub, and Senior Chief Foster, his top hand with torpedoes. During training exercises at sea, Mitchell’s aviation smarts help him outwit Captain Hardy himself, a master of sub tactics. The two doctors at last reveal that they want to use two torpedo tubes for housing two submersibles for recovering radioactive materials from the sea bottom and from leaking cans of radioactive waste. We can tell you that while the Russian waste disposal is within allowable limits, someone has stolen some nuclear warheads and hidden them in the Kara Sea for later resale. Eventually, the familiar “run silent, run deep” scenario arises when the sub is discovered by echo-location and must make its way out of Russian waters, again with Mitchell’s aviation smarts.
Strong satisfactions without accenting heroics. Well done indeed.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-765-30788-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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