Ineffably, incoherently, inexplicably inane.
Legendary lady pirate Anne Bonny improbably becomes a feminist heroine in this florid reimagining of her life and crimes, courtesy of Time magazine senior editor Farley (My Favorite War, 1996).
The story begins in County Cork around the turn of the 18th century, where Anne, privileged only child of a prosperous landowner, asserts her independence in sporting competition with other children, unaware that her family’s fortunes are imperiled. Her father’s gambling debts send him to America, and Anne and her “Ma” in later pursuit of him aboard a ship carrying slaves (and dangers), whereupon Anne ends up essentially orphaned and alone in South Carolina, thence—spurred by a conveniently acquired love of seafaring—to the Bahamas, where she dresses as a man and auditions, as it were, for a freebooter’s career. “I am of a sufficient height and with broad enough shoulders, that my secret was never guessed,” she confides, relating her exploits from the perspective of old age. Tavern-hopping, she meets Erroll Flynn–like pirate Calico Jack Rackam, joins his dastardly crew aboard the William, and embarks on the adventure she feels born for (“I never felt my womanhood so intensely as when I became a man of the sea”). Astonishments proliferate, as the William savages Spanish galleons, earning vast riches and the notoriety that brings its “men” to the gallows—saving Anne and a captured seaman, Read (also possessed of a remarkable secret). Well, why not? Our Heroine is a paragon of ethnic and gender sensitivity whose adaptation to the piratical “lifestyle” (her word) is eased by her matchless daring, eloquent familiarity with Shakespeare and the classics, and supremacy at chess (the latter skill impresses Calico Jack and leads to his happy discovery of her more purely biological attributes). Absurdity rules the waves, justice is served and bonny Anne lives on to tell thee.
Ineffably, incoherently, inexplicably inane.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-8245-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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