From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima with Herman Wouk and the Henry family: an even longer book than The Winds of War (1971), with even greater emphasis on "scrupulous accuracy of locale and historical fact" at the expense of emotional involvement. Again Wouk's inbred cast of characters is programmed to be at all the right places and represent all the big issues. Capt. "Pug" Henry is Admiral Halsey's favorite commander—a vital presence at the battles of Midway, Guadalcanal, and Leyte Gulf, with time out to be FDR's Lend-Lease emissary in Moscow and then sit in on the Teheran conference. Pug's wife back home has a lover who's working on the A-bomb. Son Warren is a dive-bomber pilot killed at Midway. And son Byron is a submarine diving officer whose Jewish wife Natalie is stuck in Italy with her author uncle; they will almost escape many times before being brutalized by Eichmann in concentration camps, thus rediscovering their Jewishness. Meanwhile, Natalie's old Polish cousin Berel is escaping from Auschwitz with filmed evidence of atrocities, and Natalie's old flame, diplomat Leslie Slote, is trying to convince the complacent Allies that there really is a holocaust going on in Europe. Very familiar materials, arranged far too neatly; but Wouk is a gifted enough storyteller and dialogue-writer to make each personal sequence—from sub warfare to concentration-camp horrors—flicker with momentary vitality. Unfortunately, however, these sequences are separated by pages and pages of debate ("on the whole, the analogy between Auschwitz and Oak Ridge seems forced") and barely digested history, mostly military (from both German and Allied points of view). As a result, the human stories lose whatever small momentum they begin with: you can see every plot development coming at least 50 pages down the pike. Wouk's seriousness must be admired, but even War and Peace puts people first, ideas second, history third. Here it's the reverse order, premised on the notion that a wholesale retelling—without the focused intensity of a James Jones or an Elie Wiesel-is enough: "they will not have died in vain, if the remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time for peace." Enlivened only occasionally by Wouk's story-telling talents, such nobly intentioned bombast is likely to be—to an even greater degree than The Winds of War-much-bought and little-read.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1978
ISBN: 0316954993
Page Count: 1056
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1978
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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