A wide-ranging historical romance—the first novel by a historian hitherto known for his two books about the Rockefeller family—hearkens back to the American Revolution and the complex figure of Benedict Arnold, renowned among military peers as “the very genius of war” while subsequently reviled as the very apotheosis of treachery and deceit. Harr’s efficient narrative (marred only by early pages weighted down with awkwardly introduced historical background information) shifts adroitly between civilian life on the home front (particularly Philadelphia, which eventually, briefly falls under British control) and the various battlefields where Arnold’s reputation for tactical mastery was earned. There are especially vivid accounts of the battles of Lake Champlain’s Valcourt Bay (a naval encounter in which Arnold simulated a trap, then gracefully “escaped” it), New York’s Fort Stanwix (where Arnold ingeniously co-opted enemy General “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne’s solidarity with Mohawk and Seneca Indians), and—a critical turning-point—Saratoga. Numerous historical figures appear and reappear, including a morally conflicted (though ever dutiful) Commander George Washington, a politically astute Alexander Hamilton, and—arguably the story’s secondary protagonist—British Major John Andre, a cultivated, stoical, and thoroughly decent man whose fate becomes inexorably linked with Arnold’s once the latter has turned his back on the “pompous” US Congress that undervalues and underestimates him and reluctantly changed his allegiance. Harr neither idealizes Arnold’s belligerent charisma nor soft-pedals his intemperate vanity; the result is the most compelling of a series of characterizations that incarnate, in moving human form, the volatile emotions of an emergent nation divided by the warring claims of loyalty and independence. The novels of Kenneth Roberts (such as Arundel and Rabble in Arms, both from the 1930s) remain the standard for fiction portraying this era. But Harr’s ambitious debut is an informed, dramatic, and well-woven contribution to a genre that seems to be, and shouldn’t be, out of fashion these days.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88704-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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