Readers should hardly notice the novel’s epic length, breezing through laudable characters and a global plot running at full...
In this military thriller, a coup in North Korea begets civil war, which, given the country’s chemical and nuclear weapons, could have worldwide repercussions.
The apparent redeployment of North Korean troops from the Demilitarized Zone surprises South Korean and American officers alike. They rightly surmise that a coup is under way against Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un. Kim’s initially rumored assassination becomes a reality when millions who tuned in to the leader’s televised announcement witness his death. The resultant fighting in North Korea is between three factions: the Kim family, the Korean Workers’ Party, and the military. But other nations especially worry about North Korea’s “nuclear stockpile.” South Korea sends army units to secure the area by tackling the North’s nuclear facilities and chemical-weapons depots. North Korean civilians trying to escape via the country’s border with China, meanwhile, are getting shot by Chinese soldiers stationed there. Camps set up for the refugees are quickly overwhelmed by the staggering number of people who need food and water. China, like everyone else, is apprehensive about Kim’s armaments. The country decides to march troops into North Korea to find and destroy the nuclear weapons on its own. But an altercation between China and South Korea/U.S. allies is feasible and might spark a war. This swiftly paced, 510-page novel is a sequel to Bond’s 1989 Red Phoenix (with Patrick Larkin). A beginning recap forgoes any necessity to read the previous book, though it’s a treat to see returning characters like Col. Kevin Little at the DMZ. There’s no real central character, giving the narrative an appropriate expansiveness among its Korean, American, Chinese, and even Russian characters. Hero status is shared, too, and standouts include Col. Rhee Han-gil, who leads a brigade covertly into North Korean territory, and Cho Ho-jin, a spy for the Russians who ultimately aligns with South Korea. Bond and Carlson (Lash-Up, 2015, etc.) bounce the story from scene to scene like a tightly edited action movie, an impressive tempo kick-started in the opening when Little’s immediately under fire trying to help potential defectors fleeing to South Korea.
Readers should hardly notice the novel’s epic length, breezing through laudable characters and a global plot running at full tilt.Pub Date: March 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5196-3538-9
Page Count: 510
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
