Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini meet in New York and set about plumbing the depths of spiritualism, while an intrepid reporter sniffs around for the truth.
The second novel from Brownstein (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W, 2002) features earnest debates on the afterlife and the thrumming energy of Manhattan in full Prohibition bloom. Set in the spring of 1922, it concerns the relationship between old friends Doyle and Houdini. The normally scientific Doyle has become a believer in spiritualism, something that Houdini has made it his mission to debunk. This low-key conflict between the men is brought to the fore by Doyle’s championing of famous (and heart-stoppingly beautiful) medium Margery and the attempts of hard-driving reporter Molly Goodman, who tries her best to get the scoop on what Doyle and Houdini are bickering about. The twined stories of the Doyle-Houdini debate and Molly’s investigation of same don’t quite come to a satisfying conclusion—indeed, Molly’s idealistically conflicted inner life is ultimately more engaging than much of the fanciful plot. But the author does have a knack for coloring pages with odd detail, as in his description of Molly’s living arrangement: “Molly rented a room in a Greenwich Village walk-up on Gay Street, where the last of the neighborhood Negroes lived. The bathroom was in the hall, and there was a painter, Pignoli, who used the tub to wash his terrier, Goldman.” Mindful of the charlatanism of the séances and spirit photographs that dominated the spiritualist fad of the time, he is careful not to let the book become overly cynical and even leaves open the chance that Margery could be an actual visionary (it’s just that her visions are not of departed relatives but of calamitous historical events soon to come) The writing is good, but there’s quite a lot that doesn’t come together.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05152-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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