No other bestselling author crunches the language quite like Cook, but he does know how to make his pages fly—which is what made last year's dull Blindsight so unforgivable. Not so this newest, which finds Cook back on track—like a runaway locomotive- -with a manically entertaining thriller. Sean Murphy is a brash son of Boston's Irish ghetto, a reformed thief whose brains have gotten him into Harvard Med. Now Sean's heading for Miami's Forbes Cancer Center, which has a mysterious 100% success rate treating medulloblastoma, a type of brain cancer. Once south, though, Sean finds that the Center's head, Randolph Mason, wants him to work not on the ``medulloblastoma protocol'' but on crystallizing ``murine monoclonal antibodies'' (Cook pours on the medical know-how here). Moreover, Janet Reardon, the nurse/lover Sean dumped in Boston, has followed Sean to Forbes. But never mind: Sean decides to steal Forbes's research and give it to the world, and to enlist Janet's help. When Forbes's Japanese backers learn of Sean's aim, though, they send an assassin after him; but the killer has to get in line behind the p.i. that Mason has hired to look into Sean, and the Nazi-like head of Forbes security—not to mention Forbes's resident orderly/serial-killer (no threat to Hannibal Lecter, though he does keep his dead mom in a freezer) who's been ``liberating'' patients, and who decides that Janet is on to him. A madcap chase to Key West and back winds up with Sean taking Mason hostage. Will a SWAT team neutralize Sean before he can prove that the medulloblastoma protocol is key to an evil scheme to fund the money-starved Clinic? All this antic action, and a Message about the financial plight of medical research too: So what if Janet finds her heart ``pounding and knowing her face is flushed''? Chalk up another big one for Cook. (Literary Guild Dual Selection for Winter)
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-399-13771-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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