Author of several excellent high-action period juveniles for older readers, Sutcliffe applies her straight-arrow narration and uncluttered staging to a fictionalized version of the true story of a Scottish gunner and swordsman—who was taken prisoner by the Turks in 1807 and later became Emir of the holy city of Medina. To his surprise, Thomas Keith of the 78th Highlanders was not sent to Cairo after his capture in Egypt during the Napoleonic War. Instead, he was bought from his captors by the commander at El Hamid. Resigned, Thomas will settle down to learn Arabic and, at the suggestion of a courteous, friendly French colonel, study the Koran. (After his conversion to Islam, he'll be known as Ibrahim Effendi.) It is Thomas' friendship with Tussun, son of the Ottoman Viceroy in Egypt that shapes his career. (It was Tussun who released him from the commander.) Meanwhile, even off the battleground, Thomas has narrow escapes: once he's saved by the Vicereine's diplomacy and at another time he fights off ten men. There are also many forays of war, including the final campaigns to free the cities of the Hijaz on the western border of the Red Sea. Blood and sand there are aplenty—along with pounding hoofs; screaming men and beasts; war cries; long, long vistas, and, throughout, a tangle of treachery, baroque negotiations, and courtesies. Finally, Thomas has a brief interval of true happiness with the wife he rescued from a massacre, and he treasures the friendship with Tussun—but at the close, death carries the day. Although the boyish high-minded simplicity of the hero might be suited more to the older juvenile audience, this is nonetheless a forthright tale of national/tribal war, with action as clean as a hound's tooth.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1989
ISBN: 0340415185
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton/Hachette UK
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1989
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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