In this fact/fiction hybrid, Barker (Union Street, 1983, etc.) turns from the struggle for survival of northern England working- class folk to the struggle back to sanity by British officers unhinged by WW I trench warfare. Craiglockhart War Hospital, a grim psychiatric facility outside Edinburgh, is the setting. The framework is the arrival of Siegfried Sassoon at Craiglockhart in the summer of 1917, and his discharge back to France in November. Sassoon is treated by the eminent neurologist (and Army captain) William Rivers, whose job is to restore his damaged warriors to fighting condition. Sassoon is a relatively easy assignment. Despite his public statement protesting the war, Sassoon is no pacifist; this complex poet feels at home in the Army and is an exceptionally courageous officer, beloved by his men, to whom he feels a blood-debt that can be paid only by his return. For all the sparring between Sassoon and Rivers, only a hair separates them, for the latter is also a man of enormous integrity, profoundly troubled by the horrors his patients must endure. And it is these horrors (not the clipped exchanges of Sassoon and Rivers) that linger in the mind: Burns's vomiting nightmares caused by a mouthful of decomposing German flesh; Prior's being rendered mute after handling a human eye. At the center is Rivers, a model therapist, whose unstinting support may give even the wretched Burns a chance at a normal life. Barker has also provided some workmanlike off-base romance for Prior, her one developed fictional character; but the heart of the work, where the big fish swim, is Rivers's consciousness, his insights into front- line behavior enriched by his anthropological straining. Don't look here for the dramatic sweep of a war novel; instead, you get a scrupulously fair reconstruction of Craiglockhart, plus a moving empathy for both doctors and patients. The extent of that empathy earns Barker's work a place on the shelf of WW I literature.
Pub Date: April 8, 1992
ISBN: 0-525-93427-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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