Actor Hackman collaborates with Lenihan, a scuba-diving and sunken-ship aficionado, on an American swashbuckler aspiring to be the next Aubrey-Maturin. It takes about a hundred pages for 17-year-old Jack O’Reilly to witness his trusting Irish father and worldly-wise Cuban mother cheated out of their land and then murdered by a dastardly Spaniard, Count de Silva. Left for dead by the Count’s minions, Jack himself staggers back to the Perdido Star, the US merchant ship that brought his family to Cuba, and is welcomed aboard by the ship’s first mate, a kindly seasoned salt named Quince. From there, the voyage becomes a series of action pieces interwoven with narratives of seafaring lore as Jack goes halfway around the world, enduring darkly violent storms and vivid battles on land and sea as he grows to manhood, earns the respect of the crew, and returns to Havana as the notorious Pacific pirate “Black Jack” O’Reilly set upon avenging his parents. Set in 1805, when America was doing a bad job of staying neutral during the Napoleonic Wars, what saves this seafarer from being yet another serving of half-baked Sabatini is the peculiar expertise the authors add about Kentucky rifles and makeshift diving when Jack, naive genius that he is, invents a diving bell to rescue his father’s gun-making equipment while the crew is marooned on an atoll somewhere west of Tahiti. For full effect, add a few postmodern Hollywood casting decisions that include an Queeg-like captain, a pompous Dutch slaver, a Chinese martial arts expert masquerading as a cook, a sentimental balladeer, and an annoying French American schoolboy, Paul Le Maire, who peckishly corrects villains when they misquote Shakespeare and Voltaire. Standard swashbuckler that’s slow at the start but then delivers satisfying action and rousing derring-do, even if the characterizations are as thin as Errol Flynn’s tights. (Literary Guild featured alternate; $100,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55704-398-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Newmarket Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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