As in World's Fair, Doctorow returns once again to his impeccably rendered 1930's. but this time in order to chronicle, with a detail and color and immediacy that make celluloid seem almost clumsy and unnecessary, the decline and fall of the legendary New York gangster Dutch Schultz. Billy Behan, a fatherless Irish-Jewish kid from the East Bronx, is 15 when he first has the luck one day to see Schultz in the flesh—and the greater luck briefly to catch the illustrious mobster's attention. Determined that he'll somehow infiltrate his way into the inner sanctums of the gang ("whatever my life was going to be in this world it would have something to do with Mr. Schultz"), Billy reveals an ingenuity and Oliver-Twist-like daring that accomplish his ends. In the next few months of his life he will graduate from lowly coffee-fetcher for the hoodlums (there's Schultz, his brains Abba-dabba Berman, his hit-man Lulu Rosenkrantz, his driver Mickey, his faithful aide Irving) to pickup man, to trusted lookout and information-getter, and finally—just before the gang is killed the following October in a surprise shootout in a bar in Newark-to full-fledged and salaried member of the Schultz mob. On the way to that bloody night (in 1935) in a dingy back room, plenty will happen to this American-Dickensian Billy Behan (a.k.a. Billy Bathgate) and around him—he'll see a man sent into the deep Atlantic with his feet in a tub of cement, there will be a long waiting period in an upstate hotel, a rigged trial for tax evasion, more murders, and even a dangerous, passionate liaison between young Billy and Schultz's current (and very rich) moll, complete with a few days in horse-crazy Saratoga in August. Back in the city, the gang finds itself under mounting pressures (not only are other gangs, but so is special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey moving in on them), and when the dreadful shootout comes, only Billy, Ishmael-like, lives to tell the tale—and to provide a denoument that may or may not convince every reader. What could have been merely another round of nostalgia-drenched mobster romancing earns a claim, by end, to a genuine depth, and, formed by the magical skill of Doctorow's incomparable past-painting hands, the book simply pulls and pulls and pulls.
Pub Date: Feb. 22, 1988
ISBN: 0812981170
Page Count: 329
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1988
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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