Two years ago, Estleman completed his Detroit quintet with Thunder City, a series that deserves reprint in a single volume...
Thirty years in the life of a master craftsman—a hangman—from his first hanging to his displacement by the infamous electric chair.
Estleman’s prose snaps like fresh linen Treasury bills, using a Cold-Eye-of-God style for a type of fiction-truer-than-fact stretching back to Defoe’s true-fact novel Journal of the Plague Year. Is Oscar Stone, the most famed hangman in the States, satisfied to bring a rapist or murderer to his just reward? “No. I am not a follower of the Old Testament. Whatever his deed, no man deserves to choke to death slowly or have his head torn from his shoulders like a chicken. I am a simple craftsman, like the fellow who built this scaffold. The sweetest sound to me is the clean sharp crack of a neck breaking precisely at the second cervical vertebra.” Moving from hanging to hanging throughout the West, Oscar carries his many tools with him, including lissome, silken ropes of Indian hemp oiled to a golden saffron, with knots that slip perfectly into the hollow under the left ear for a loud clean break. We follow Oscar as a runaway youth riding with the Yankees to his training as a cabinet- (and coffin-) maker to his courtship of Gretchen Smollet. He apprentices as a hangman to Rudd, a tippler who has sewn up all the hangings in the Kansas area. Later, when she can’t bear his work, Gretchen flees and he spends much of the story looking for her. Eventually, he finds that he may or may not have fathered a son with her, and that he may unwittingly have hung him as a murderer—this in the later days, before he’s down to two hangings a year and ready to retire on his investments.
Two years ago, Estleman completed his Detroit quintet with Thunder City, a series that deserves reprint in a single volume that can rest somewhere between Dreiser and Norris.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-86970-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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
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
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