An intimate look at a life lived as a lie.
In this historical novel based on a true story, a man operates as a doctor in both the United States and Ireland, despite having only a GED and a handful of forged credentials.
Desmond Donahue is born in Ireland during World War II and grows up in crippling poverty. His pursuit of education is always threatened by the necessity of working to support his family. He leaves his small town of Ballymorris to take various construction jobs in London, until a chance encounter with a stranger on a train gives him an opportunity to go to America. In Chicago, he witnesses the excitement and importance of physicians at Cook County General Hospital and resolves to become a doctor; he earns his GED and returns to Ireland to study medicine in Cork. The specter of his impoverished upbringing pushes him to work harder, but also causes him to pursue shortcuts in his studies. His wastrel friend, Dr. Roger Connolly, woos him into accepting forged medical credentials in order to join his practice. Desmond eventually becomes a surgeon in Florida, but after an automobile accident, he’s drawn into a court battle that turns his secret into headline news. O’Connor’s (The Barbarossa Covenant, 2015) novel straddles fiction and nonfiction, as he crafted much of it from documents from a real-life acquaintance who served as the inspiration for Desmond. As the author paints him, Desmond is a thoughtful figure, truthfully dedicated to helping others, but always motivated by the poverty of his youth. This creates a sympathetic but believably contradictory character—a man living a constant falsehood while also judging his fellow deceivers, such as a doctor named Murray Whittle, who’s defrauding nursing home patients, and the beautiful Margaret Kerrigan, who fakes a marriage with Desmond seemingly to take revenge on another doctor who broke her heart. O’Connor handles Desmond’s later struggle with depression and the hopelessness he feels after being exposed with a rare delicacy. Ultimately, however, although the novel is sympathetic to Desmond’s plight, it does little to explore how his falsehoods affect other characters.
An intimate look at a life lived as a lie.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Pegasus Publishing & Entertainment Group
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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