A husk of a novel; busy, but without cumulative power.
In the wake of the Civil War, blacks and whites struggle to make sense of their changed lives; out West, Indians struggle against the Washitu (whites).
McCaig’s latest, covering the years 1865 to 1876, is a partial continuation of Jacob’s Ladder (1998). Here again are the Gatewoods of Virginia on their Stratford plantation, their patriarch Samuel much chastened. His heir Duncan, a Confederate major and one-armed victim, goes to work for his old boss General Mahone, now building railroads, for which he needs crossties from Samuel’s sawmill. Mahone’s money man Eben Barnwell, a go-getting upstart Yankee, has his sights fixed on Samuel’s granddaughter Pauline. Former slave Jesse, abandoning hope of finding his wife Maggie (sold off by Samuel), is elected Assemblyman in the Virginia legislature, whose re-configuration is an important storyline. There’s a lot going on here, and that’s just in the East. With a frequency that induces whiplash, McCaig switches to the fortunes of the Lakota, particularly a young woman called She Goes Before, who reports unemotionally her father’s hanging in Minnesota and her subsequent rape as she treks to Montana, where she will marry Ratcliff, another ex-slave and army buddy of Jesse; he is in Montana after a cattle drive from Texas. Back East Barnwell, now a millionaire, marries Pauline and saves Stratford, only to lose everything in ’74, when he absconds. Westward expansion brings Custer to Montana, where Ratliff, returning to his one true home, the army, becomes his interpreter. The climax is Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn, mined in much more depth in Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (not reviewed). McCaig spreads himself way too thin in his historical coverage; his superficially drawn characters suffer as a result. The exception is the complex Ratcliff, who would have made a splendid lead. A brave but self-hating loner, he goes to his death chanting “Hincty Nigger,” the insult he wears as a badge of honor.
A husk of a novel; busy, but without cumulative power.Pub Date: March 19, 2007
ISBN: 0-393-06246-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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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