Entertaining if repetitive fictional homage to a momentous period—and a diverting curio for Civil War buffs, as well as...
Veteran Gorman gathers original stories from established genre writers: 18 tales about spies, saboteurs, assassins, frauds, blockade runners, and varied sordid types during the Civil War.
Gorman (Save the Last Dance for Me, p. tktk, etc.) notes in his introduction that although the surviving stories of historical Civil War espionage and covert operations make great reading, they leave enough unanswered questions to inspire fictional exploration. While most of the pieces here use factual locations (Marie Jakober, in “Slither,” takes a grim look inside Richmond’s notorious Libby Prison), personalities (Alan Pinkerton, founder of the detective agency and historical Union spymaster, appears in Ray Vukevich’s “The Swan” and in Robert Randisi’s “The Knights of Liberty”), and events (Sherman’s horrifying march of destruction haunts the burned-out Confederate cavalry in John Lutz’s “Hobson’s Choice”), most of the stories use the war and its aftermath (“The Dead Line,” Kristine Kathyrn Rusch’s bitter revenger, reaches its climax on a British cruise ship in 1911) to highlight familiar conflicts of loyalty and identity in the face of brutal, unconscionable violence. The blasted road to Atlanta could be set in Viet Nam as a wounded Union recruit witnesses evil in the senseless brutality inflicted on Confederate refugees by a squad of Union vigilantes in Loren Estleman’s brief but powerful “South Georgia Crossing.” Just when it seems that every yarn is another variation of war as hell, Edward Hoch (in “The Counterfeit Copperhead”) tells of a confidence man playing both sides against each other, and Bill Crider (in “Belle Boyd, Rebel Spy”) transforms a historic secret agent into a Hollywood action heroine.
Entertaining if repetitive fictional homage to a momentous period—and a diverting curio for Civil War buffs, as well as mystery and western fans.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-87487-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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