Bauer's second novel (after Dexterity, 1989) plays with two durable American themes: the national fondness for snake oil and self-made men. This engaging and episodic romp through the first half of the 20th-century is lighter, more accessible, and far more commercial than Bauer's lyrically intense debut. Born on the Texas frontier at the turn of the century, Luther Mathias witnesses his mother's fevered madness and death, only to be abandoned by his roustabout father at ten. Young Luther joins his uncle's traveling medicine show and proves a quick study. He's garrulous and charming, deriving his talent from his knowledge of the Bible and his uncle's highfalutin lingo. But at 13, Luther grows disillusioned with his uncle's scam. When he leaves the show at 17, Luther survives by his wits, eventually acquiring a mail- order medical degree and setting up practice in a Texas bordertown as a specialist in VD cures. All this changes when beautiful movie starlet Alyce Rae stumbles into town with a case of amnesia, soon followed by her vain husband, silent movie star Billy Boswell. The neurotic Billy provides Luther with his first experiment in a new specialty: cures for impotency. And when Billy summons Luther to Hollywood for a second treatment, a meeting with media magnate Haskell Albright leads to new opportunities. Luther—part Gatsby, part Citizen Cane—begins building his corn-pone empire based on the Bible, positive thinking, and healthy sex. A radio show and a clinic back in Texas allow Luther to build his tumbleweed Xanadu, all the time dreaming of his Daisy named Alyce. With Billy's tragic fall from studio grace and numerous business problems, Luther begins to see his world crumble. It's a classic tragedy of hubris, even though Luther seems to be headed off for new adventures at the end. An imaginative lark in the Doctorow vein (without the didacticism): rough-and-tumble fiction that exults in its inventiveness and seems written with an eye toward the big screen.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-688-09460-0
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
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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