Carter’s 17th book (Christmas in Plains, 2001, etc.), the first work of fiction by a US president, will certainly inform,...
Setting his hand to historical fiction, the former president focuses on the American Revolution, getting the history part right, the fiction not quite.
It’s the Revolutionary War as fought in the South—mostly Georgia, the Carolinas, Florida—and what a story that is. It has sweep, drama, suspense, and, as Carter suggests in his acknowledgments, it surprises for some who think they know what 1775–83 was all about. The war, southern-style, was a ferocious, bloody, take-no-prisoners kind of war, despite the homogeneity of the combatants. The vaunted British army was, for the most part, otherwise occupied, as was the less vaunted Continental army, George Washington only a name written on the wind. Miles away from Bunker Hill, Saratoga, etc., guerrilla warfare ruled: Loyalists (to Britain) vs. Rebels (against Britain), but Americans all, behaving toward each other as savagely as if they had never been friends and neighbors. Not long before the breakout of hostilities, Ethan Pratt and his wife Epsey, newly married, leave Philadelphia to arrive, ultimately, in Georgia, where they stake out a land claim, convinced they’ll be able to ignore those complex and vaguely irritating events up north in the interests of getting on with what matters—raising crops and family. It’s a delusion, of course, and soon enough the two are swept up in the swirl of fast-moving events: Ethan, a pacifist at heart, joins a Rebel militia group; Epsey, left on her own, finds protection among the Quakers. Poignant, even desperate things happen to both, but essentially they’re protagonists at the periphery. At one point, for instance, Ethan virtually vanishes from the action for 160 pages. It’s hard, then, not to conclude that it’s the history that fascinates the author, while the fiction merely interests him.
Carter’s 17th book (Christmas in Plains, 2001, etc.), the first work of fiction by a US president, will certainly inform, but, lacking the novelist’s spark, it’s unlikely to move or grip.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-5542-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
IN THE NEWS
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
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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