An intelligently written techno-thriller that’s reminiscent of the late Tom Clancy’s work.
In Ratcliffe’s debut thriller, Russia launches a pre-emptive nuclear attack, and the United States must defend itself at sea, on land and in the air.
In 1994, after learning that the U.S. military has a space shuttle–based laser to target intercontinental ballistic missiles, Russia’s leader decides to launch a pre-emptive strike against the United States. The American president quickly retaliates, and in no time, both countries are in the middle of a nuclear war. The novel views the conflict from many points of view, including that of a patrolling U.S. submarine crew, a B-1B bomber pilot flying through hostile skies, and a U.S. Army Special Forces unit on a suicide mission to infiltrate Russia and take out its missile silos. The main character, however, is Gen. Robert Thomas, who, with the U.S. government literally on the run, is given the difficult job of negotiating with surviving Russian leadership to secure a cease-fire. Ultimately, he makes a personal sacrifice reminiscent of the one the bomber pilot makes at the end of Eugene Burdick’s Fail-Safe (1962), the novel that, along with Peter George’s 1958 novel Red Alert (the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove), helped kicked off this genre. The author, a former U.S. Navy captain, presents a persuasive depiction of how a nuclear war might actually be fought, including all the strategizing by the president and his argumentative military staff. That said, among the large cast of characters, only one, Gen. Thomas, truly stands out; with his family left behind in the Washington, D.C., blast zone, he carries the emotional brunt of the story. Although it’s intriguing that the author set his story in 1994, before the events of 9/11 drove home new realities, it’s also strange that a book about nuclear war has no discussion about the long-term consequences of atomic radiation, making such a war seem winnable. For red-meat military-thriller fans, however, there’s action aplenty, all excitingly described and cogently dramatized.
An intelligently written techno-thriller that’s reminiscent of the late Tom Clancy’s work.Pub Date: April 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481998079
Page Count: 470
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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