It doesn’t spoil the suspense of this historical fiction to know which side wins.
Germany makes a last-gasp attempt to defeat the Allies and change the course of history, in the latest from Frost (The Six Messiahs, 1995, etc.).
In the winter of 1944, when most Nazi military leaders believe defeat is near, Hitler has Lieutenant Colonel Otto Skorzeny launch a brazen plan. He recruits a secret brigade of 2,000 men, all of whom speak English and are conversant in American culture, to penetrate the enemy’s defenses and lay the groundwork for a final attack. The next step involves an elite corps of 20 soldiers within that brigade, those most capable of passing as American soldiers and striking at the heart of the Allied braintrust. Only their leader, the ruthless SS officer Erich Von Leinsdorf, knows (along with the reader) who their assassination target is and how they will proceed. Von Leinsdorf’s chief aide in this secret mission is Private Bernard Oster, raised in Brooklyn before returning to his homeland with his German parents, and a soldier well versed in the American vernacular Von Leinsdorf will need for the scheme to succeed. Yet from the start, Oster displays divided loyalties, leaving the reader to wonder where his allegiance will ultimately lie as the mission turns increasingly deadly. Though much of the dialogue sounds recycled from black-and-white war movies, Frost opts for moral ambiguity over the standard heroes-and-villains clichés. As the narrative humanizes some of the German soldiers, it details the corruption of black-market American profiteers, resulting in alliances that further complicate fidelities. Ultimately, the plot turns into a game of two-on-two, as Earl Grannit, a New York police investigator before enlisting, and his more innocent sidekick, Ole Carlson, discover the Nazi plan and do their best to thwart it.
It doesn’t spoil the suspense of this historical fiction to know which side wins.Pub Date: May 15, 2007
ISBN: 1-4013-0222-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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