On balance, Phillips’s fictional touches do not help illuminate the issues of race and identity, which he has dealt with...
Phillips (Dancing in the Dark, 2005, etc.) mixes fact and fiction to examine the sad fates of three very different men of color in England.
Francis Barber, more son than servant to Dr. Samuel Johnson, was one of the best-known black men in London in the 18th century. In Phillips’s first piece (“Dr. Johnson’s Watch”), the unnamed narrator rides in the same coach as Barber, the Doctor’s principal legatee, to the great man’s funeral. Sixteen years later, the narrator, by now a retired financier, travels to Lichfield, Johnson’s hometown, to find Barber’s white wife living in poverty and Barber on his deathbed in a grim infirmary; communication is minimal. Barber’s squandering of his legacy has been well-documented, and Phillips adds no new insights. The second, much longer piece, “Made in Wales,” is a workmanlike third-person account of the life of Randolph Turpin, the mixed-race British boxer whose career highlight was his 1951 defeat of Sugar Ray Robinson to become world middleweight champion. Turpin held the title for 64 days before Robinson reclaimed it at their New York rematch. From there it was mostly downhill for Turpin: woman troubles, money troubles, bankruptcy and suicide at 38. The last piece, “Northern Lights,” is the harrowing story of David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who wound up in Leeds in Yorkshire in 1949. (Phillips’s family emigrated from the Caribbean to Leeds, where the author was raised.) Phillips uses some seven different and presumably invented narrators for his portrait of Oluwale; they track his deterioration, but the man remains an enigma, and the summaries of the city’s history are obtrusive. The Nigerian was a gentle loner whose homelessness made him the target of two rogue cops, who caused his death by drowning and were convicted on assault charges. In death Oluwale’s name became a rallying cry for activists.
On balance, Phillips’s fictional touches do not help illuminate the issues of race and identity, which he has dealt with better elsewhere.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4397-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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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