A smart, engrossing tale that entertainingly uses science.
A genetic algorithm intended as a cure for cancer becomes part of someone’s nefarious and deadly experiments in this techno-thriller.
After losing both parents to cancer, oncologist Dr. Juan Gutierrez devoted his life to finding a cure. While researching generations of species at the pharmaceutical company AgriMed, Juan uncovers an evolutionary pattern. From this, he derives an algorithm that he hopes will combat cancer. Meanwhile, FBI Special Agent Nate Carrington is investigating cases of lethal attacks by animals, such as dogs and birds. These cases are linked by the animals’ DNA evidence, which suggests some form of genetic manipulation. Nate soon determines that someone has pilfered Juan’s algorithm for experiments that ultimately include human subjects. To make matters worse, the stolen algorithm is an older, less stable version and leads to a number of people becoming infected with a life-threatening virus. One of the stricken may be Juan’s new romantic interest, Kathy O’Reilly, who happens to be a survivor of an animal attack. She and her Nevada rancher parents, Frank and Megan, are unwitting participants in an experiment that puts many in danger. Nate and Juan have little time to find the culprit and a cure before the death count among humans starts rising exponentially. Rothman’s (Perimeter, 2018, etc.) tale moves at a steady clip. Dialogue, in particular, is concise; in one scene, Juan converses with his boss over the phone and police officers in person, and the concurrent exchanges are clear and coherent. Scientific terminology is likewise comprehensible, thanks to the author supplying context or Juan simply explaining terms to an individual. While characters are dynamic, especially the O’Reillys, the most memorable is Jasper, a stray dog Frank and Megan take in. Readers know from the beginning that the hyper-intelligent canine is a lab escapee. But despite Jasper’s tie to the experiments, Rothman zeros in on his empathy and fierce loyalty, traits that make his human counterparts even more likable. In useful addenda, the author elucidates on two subjects from the narrative, genetically modified organisms and gene therapy.
A smart, engrossing tale that entertainingly uses science.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79027-123-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2019
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
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