Following the assassination of an American military attachÇ in the former USSR, the Pentagon sends Marcinko on a priority (Designation Gold) mission to Moscow with orders to investigate the brutal murder. A sometime Navy SEAL (whose real-life exploits in Vietnam were chronicled in the 1992 bestseller Rogue Warrior), Marcinko has had an active (if fictive) post-retirement career in which he offers caustic first-person accounts of dirty jobs done for low-profile agencies of the US government (Rogue Warrior: Task Force Blue, 1996, etc.). On this outing, the salty soldier of fortune raises enough homicidal hell with mafiya goons and corrupt officials to get himself expelled from Russia. Although scarcely more welcome in Washington's upper echelons, he has come away with evidence that minions of the Kremlin are smuggling nuclear material to Syria through Werner Lantos, a shady Hungarian middleman who works out of Paris. Joining forces with Avi Ben Gal (an old pal from Israel's security service), Tricky Dick heads for the City of Light, where he and his three-man team learn that the venal go-between is at the heart of a vast conspiracy to restore the erstwhile Soviet Union's superpower status and trigger a renewal of the Cold War. While well-placed traitors in their own governments resist them at every turn, Dick and Avi resourcefully manage to mount an airborne raid on a covert atomic-weapons installation near Damascus. In a climactic engagement notable for their unwonted reliance on guile as well as firepower, the two lay waste to the secret ordnance facility, bag the reptilian Lantos, and determine who should pay for the transnational plot's near-miss horrors. With sociopolitical asides (on Bill Clinton, equal employment opportunity in the armed forces, and allied targets of opportunity) as hard-hitting as the narrative action, the aging but perdurably macho man delivers another diverting road show. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-671-89673-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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