In their third outing, Marcinko and his roguish warriors do violent, imaginative battle with America's home-front enemies. Following retirement as a US Navy SEAL, Marcinko embarked on an active if fictive career as a handyman for the military (his vastly entertaining exploits are chronicled in such blood-and- thunder opera as Rogue Warrior: Green Team, 1995). This time around, the salty Vietnam vet and his handpicked crew are detailed to staunch the illicit flow of heavy weapons and ammunition from government arsenals. Thanks to the cyberspace talents of a young petty officer who can hack into Pentagon computers, Task Force Blue soon learns its ageless leader is the designated fall guy in a power struggle pitting would-be usurpers against constituted authority. Despite the best efforts of their establishment foes, Marcinko and his merry men track a truckload of stolen arms from Detroit to Tampa, from whence it is shipped to an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. They storm the offshore drilling platform, which is owned by billionaire L.C. Strawhouse, and learn that the rig is used to supply ordnance to disaffected militia groups and drug gangs throughout the country. Back on dry land, the seagoing irregulars also discover that the ultraconservative Strawhouse (who tries to enlist Marcinko in his mad cause) has been equipping domestic terrorists in hopes their lethal rampages might permit a reactive putsch that could put him in the White House. While by no means taken with the incumbent chief executive or his wimpy underlings, Marcinko pursues the man who would be America's king to a heavily guarded command post in the southern California desert. In a climactic confrontation inside the fortress, he exposes and foils Strawhouse's sinister plot before dispatching its architect in decidedly imaginative fashion. Another walk on the wild side with the Marcinko mob. (Military Book Club main selection; author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-671-79958-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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
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