by David Nevin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2004
A haunting portrait, just the kind of thing this author does so well.
Nevin continues his American Story series (Treason, 2001, etc.) with the heroic, intensely human, altogether heartbreaking story of a legendary explorer.
Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) was noticeably different from the boys he grew up with in Albemarle County, Virginia. Bigger and stronger than most, he was also quieter, a dreamer. Ever since he could remember, he decided later, he’d had a sense of American nationhood: “of vast spaces awaiting crossing . . . of freedom to strike his mark in the world and conviction that he would do so.” Rambling, his ma told him, was a family trait, but so were those periodic bouts of inexplicable despair that swept over him, that only his indomitable will enabled him to escape. Westward exploration had long also been the dream of one of Lewis’s neighbors. He happened to be Thomas Jefferson, who recognized a kindred spirit when he saw one. While Jefferson became a statesman, Lewis became a soldier, and though their paths diverged sharply they never quite lost track of each other. Eventually, the great expedition took shape, Jefferson tapped Lewis to lead it, and together with William Clark, a former comrade in arms, he embarked on his 2,000-mile “ramble,” encountering hostile grizzlies, equally hostile Indians, uncharted rivers, strange fauna, the truly remarkable Shoshone woman Sacagawea, and other wonders on his way to the Pacific Ocean. It took two years (1804–6), and on his return Lewis was lionized. Admirers made him a territorial governor and pleaded with him to write a book, both tasks for which he was eminently unsuited and which worried him into depression. He turned first to whisky, then to drugs, hoping to confound his demons but ultimately simply surrendering to them.
A haunting portrait, just the kind of thing this author does so well.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-86307-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993
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
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