Rogue Warrior, a blood-and-guts account of Marcinko's stormy- petrel career as a Navy SEAL, earned its author a top spot on 1992's bestseller lists. He could land on the charts again with this fictive sequel whose profanely opinionated, relentlessly macho, and immensely entertaining narrator is a retired naval commander named Richard Marcinko. Now a freelance operative, Marcinko is testing security at Tokyo's Narita Airport, where he finds that treacherous Americans are supplying Japanese and North Korean buyers with nuclear detonators. The trail appears to lead back to Grant Griffith, a former Defense Secretary who retains considerable clout in Washington as well as with the ailing military-industrial complex. Before Marcinko can bring the influential elder statesman to book, however, he's dragged into a deadly series of turf battles, shootouts, sting operations, and shadow wars. By no coincidence, moreover, he's recalled to active duty by Admiral Pinckney Prescott III, a longtime nemesis who puts him in command of the Red Cell, a unit that's Prescott's own creation. With help from friends in the old-boy network of Special Forces personnel, Marcinko's merry men run wild—on assignment or off—covertly acquiring the high-tech tools of their violent trade, infiltrating laxly guarded bases in the US, and otherwise trying the patience of higher authority. Leaving scores of corpses in their wake, Red Cell stalwarts find time to carry out a reconnaissance/sabotage mission in North Korean waters and to launch a mid-ocean assault (from a stolen aircraft) on a contraband-carrying vessel crewed by black-hat mercenaries. Fast action and advanced weaponry at every turn; in-your-face commentary on the powers that be; a steady stream of imaginatively salty language: What more could any red-blooded, two-fisted, he-man fantasist want?
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-79956-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
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
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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