A down-and-dirty thriller that feels as rushed as its publication date.
In a fictional version of the recent true-life event, SEAL Team Six rises to the occasion and terminates the world’s most famous terrorist.
As the ghostwriter for Richard Marcinko, the founder and first Commanding Officer of the now-famous SEAL Team Six, Weisman (Direct Action, 2005, etc.) is uniquely qualified to fictionalize the May 2011 actions that killed Osama bin Laden. However, this choppy, propulsive invention suffers from the fact that the real events and operators may prove more intriguing, should the veil of secrecy ever be lifted on Operation Neptune Spear. But the armchair warriors who dig Tom Clancy and his ilk will find plenty of techno-babble here. One of the book’s major advantages is that Weisman looks at the operation from disparate viewpoints, represented by major characters. Intelligence on the ground comes from Charlie Becker, a retired Ranger who has since gone native as an in-country spook in Pakistan. “God, Charlie understood, is indeed great,” Weisman writes. “But so, Charlie knew, is a Barnes 70-grain TSX bullet. Or a Match King 77-grain. If Bin Laden wanted to recite kalimah shahada on his way to martyrdom, either one would help him along the path equally as well.” Politics are covered by Anthony Mercaldi, the Director of the CIA. It’s Mercaldi’s character who puts readers in the room with the president of the United States (unnamed, which throws the story off a bit as the CIA and the president square off about the political ramifications). The most appealing characters are the guys doing the dirty work, notably Boatswain’s Mate Second Class Troy Roberts, a God-fearing 24-year-old with a seven-figure training tab and a death toll in double digits. The novel is much better than the typical military fare, but like the inevitable movie, it’s also not as strange or impressive as the truth.
A down-and-dirty thriller that feels as rushed as its publication date.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-211951-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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