An impressive amalgam of historical astuteness and dramatic thrills.
In this historical novel, former President Theodore Roosevelt goes on an African safari and is hunted by an assassin sent by a political enemy.
After he completes his second term as president of the United States, Roosevelt is wildly popular, but promises, following the example of George Washington, to step aside and allow someone else to lead the country, becoming “Citizen Roosevelt.” He pledges to his successor, William Howard Taft, to refrain from public comment on politics for a year, and to that end, embarks on an expedition to Africa to collect game specimens for the Smithsonian Museum and New York’s American Museum of Natural History. For all his popularity, Roosevelt has accumulated some powerful enemies, especially in the business world where he is generally seen as a “madman” and a “financial ignoramus” whose misguided economic policies strangled commerce. Among those enemies is John Pierpont Morgan, who arranges for one of Roosevelt’s bodyguards, Jimmy Dooley, to ensure the former president meets with a tragic accident. Dooley has his own personal grudge to bear—he holds Roosevelt responsible for his older brother Mickey’s imprisonment. Mickey, a New York City police officer, got caught up in Roosevelt’s anti-corruption campaign as police commissioner. Ross imaginatively conceives a gripping story that paints a vivid tableau of both Roosevelt and the tumultuous times. In addition, one subplot could make a novel of its own—Maggie Dunn, Roosevelt’s childhood friend and former flame, now a “muckraking Hearst reporter,” follows him to Africa to detail the safari and to discover his political ambitions, if any. The author’s prose is punchy and full of verve, and the plot is generously filled with drama. For readers in search of a novel that combines historical rigor with cinematic action, this is a worthy choice.
An impressive amalgam of historical astuteness and dramatic thrills.Pub Date: July 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-947548-96-1
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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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