Cut from the manuscript of Alaska, written in the same flat, fact-filled style, this chapter from the Klondike Gold Rush recounts a disastrous English expedition doggedly intent on reaching the gold fields without straying from Empire soil. Lord Lutton, "aloof. . .with an insufferable patrician manner," believes in the superiority of all things British. Upon hearing of the Rush, Lutton decides to mount an expedition that will reach the Klondike by way of Edmonton, Canada, avoiding the despised America. But, as were some 1500 others, he was misled by unscrupulous residents of that boom town (not one seeker found gold; 70 died en route). With his nephew, Philip Henslow, plucked out of Oxford; Harry Carpenter, an experienced traveler; Trevor Blythe, a poet chum of Philip's; and Tim Fogarty, a practical Irishman and the expedition's servant, he travels by steamer and rail to Edmonton. From this tent-town bedlam the group sails the great Mackenzie River towards the Arctic Ocean, planning to cut across the Rockies and head south to the gold fields. After one winter successfully weathered, nephew Philip drowns, and, due to Lutton's refusal to take sensible routes (which cross American soil), Harry and Trevor die of scurvy. After further misadventures, Fogarty and Lutton reach their goal, only to discover that their two-year trip had been accomplished by the less obstinate in 15 weeks. Padded to an un-Michenerly 245 pp.—with a chapter on how the novel came to be and excerpts from a volume of poetry privately printed by Lutton to commemorate the expedition—this is a mere day-trip through Michener's heavy-handed prose and easy travel, no doubt a best-seller.
Pub Date: July 19, 1989
ISBN: 0449218473
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1989
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
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
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