First-timer Busby has a point to make about the effect of this unwinnable war on those who didn’t serve, but it doesn’t...
A young man contemplates his own mortality—and the Vietnam War—from a very safe distance.
Jeff Adams is an officer candidate undergoing training at Fort Benning just as the Vietnam War begins to wind down. He encounters a standard assortment of military types who strut their stuff in predictable ways: Rancek, a foulmouthed lieutenant who harangues and harasses one and all; Captain Lederer, the noble CO of Company 58; Sergeant Rooker T. Jones, an immense, powerfully built black man who offers instruction on the fine points of rape, pillage, and killing; and Captain Fosse, who likes to tell army jokes when not explaining the rights of prisoners. It’s clear that no one wants these new recruits to think of the enemy as human, something that troubles our hero. But Jeff Adams is from rural Texas, where serving one’s country is what a man has to do. He gets through the grueling routines as best he can, somehow dodging the wrath of the belligerent career men who shape up, indoctrinate, and punish the newcomers. A few of the men are gung-ho gook-haters raring to get to Vietnam and blow a few heads off, but Jeff and several of his buddies are having second thoughts. Then Jeff is assigned to Lieutenant Calley as a driver, while the latter awaits trial. He’s not satisfied with the lieutenant’s terse, matter-of-fact explanation of the My Lai massacre, and his doubts are intensified when his girlfriend Mary O’Hara shares her antiwar sentiments. Later, after the Kent State shootings, Jeff goes AWOL, accompanied by two friends. And all meet years later at the Vietnam War memorial in Washington for a rather anticlimactic reunion.
First-timer Busby has a point to make about the effect of this unwinnable war on those who didn’t serve, but it doesn’t exactly make for a compelling story.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87565-238-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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