Young American journalist loses his humanistic illusions in a small, revolution-torn Third World country situated off the coast of Asia. Packer, whose The Village of Waiting (1988) told of his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo, West Africa, shifts not only eastward but into fictional territory staked out by Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene: White Westerner confronted by an alien have-not world that he only half understands. Daniel Levin, reared in suburban Philadelphia, accepts an assignment to the island nation of Direv Sauran to find out the truth about its civil war and to test his mettle. His restiveness on the island is emphasized by an unsatisfactory visit from his stateside fiancÇe, who can't understand his obsession with the country. He leaves her in the capital city for an exclusive interview with the revolutionary leader, Fra Boboy, in his mountain fastness among a people whose name for a white is ``Ngot'' (Half Man), their forest bogeyman. Boboy's view is that the East/West ideological struggle is dead ``and history is born in bastard lands.'' Levin is accompanied on the trip by Ding, an educated, once well-to-do Sauranan photographer split between his native culture and Western trappings. Packer's descriptions of the country—its sights, sounds, and smells—are remarkably vivid, and the trip to the revolutionary redoubt is high adventure. But the major flaw in this otherwise gripping novel is the amount of space given to long ideological/philosophical debates, which have a stagy air and often descend into obscurity. Fra Boboy, whose doctoral dissertation was on Sacrifice, Impurity, State: Structures of Self and Violence in Modern Primitive Society, doesn't ring true as a man of action. And Levin's self-probing lacks real weight. Striking depiction of an impoverished Asian country caught up in a post-cold war revolutionary struggle—but excessive philosophizing chips away at credibility and readability.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-58192-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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