Nevin loves his political details—perhaps a bit more than most readers will—but this is vivid storytelling about a time as...
Another lively look back at the newborn US by a historical novelist who respects both his disciplines.
Thomas Jefferson called it the Second Revolution—that period during which the new nation fought desperately to remain a democracy. The year is 1800; Jefferson has just thwarted John Adams’s bid for a second term in an election notable for its ideological bitterness. The two-party system grew out of it; class warfare took a great leap forward because of it. The Republicans, led by Jefferson and James Madison, passionate about the idea of government by ordinary people, find themselves in a death struggle with their former brothers in arms—the war against England had, after all, ended only 17 years earlier. Say “ordinary people” to the Federalists, led by Hamilton and Adams, and you evoke that fearsome French rabble making profligate use of the guillotine at the expense of extraordinary people not unlike the Federalists. As in the earlier novels of this series (Eagle’s Cry, 2000, etc.), Nevin’s characters are a judicious mix of the fictitious and the real, but none are more appealing than delicious, unabashedly ambitious Dolley Madison. She wants Jimmy Madison, her overworked, under-valued husband, to succeed Jefferson and doesn’t much care who knows it. But Burr, the incumbent vice-president, matches her in ambition, outstrips her—and virtually everyone else—in ruthlessness, and wants the presidency for himself, convinced it’s the greatness for which he was born. If stout-hearted Dolley is the heroine, Burr is the villain, but an endlessly complex one. Though fatally flawed, he’s charming, elegant, charismatic, basically good-hearted, a fearless risk-taker whose behavior is frequently admirable but who willfully, single-handedly almost destroys his country.
Nevin loves his political details—perhaps a bit more than most readers will—but this is vivid storytelling about a time as turbulent as it is generally neglected.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-85512-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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