From inauspicious beginnings, Smedley is destined for greatness. Born in Missouri in 1892 and raised in the coal camps of...
Lee (Limestone Wall, 2014, etc.) recounts the story of forgotten radical Agnes Smedley in this historical novel.
From inauspicious beginnings, Smedley is destined for greatness. Born in Missouri in 1892 and raised in the coal camps of Colorado, she becomes acutely aware of the economic disparity that determines so much of what a person can expect from life. After much traveling around the American Southwest, she enrolls in college in Tempe, Arizona, where she meets a woman who encourages her to pursue journalism as a mechanism of political change. “What sort of political work?” asks Smedley. “Help the working class overthrow the capitalists,” replies the woman. “Women’s emancipation. Birth control....Bring about a socialist world.” So begins Smedley’s globe-trotting career as a journalist and activist, a life that involves assisting the plots of Indian nationalists, getting imprisoned in The Tombs in New York under the Espionage Act, and making love to a spymaster only feet from a wastebasket containing a decapitated human head. Interspersed between the chapters covering her younger life are those of an adult Smedley living in a cave among the loessial hills of China, covering the defeated Red Army in its camp at Yan’an. As a journalist, she interviews Cmdr. Zhu De and brings news of the Communist forces to the rest of the world. The two strains eventually catch up with each other and intertwine, as Smedley witnesses the marriage of her politics and her purpose in life as well as all the trouble those things can cause. Lee’s prose is smooth, and her account of Smedley’s evolution is sympathetic and colorful (during an attack on Shanghai in 1931, Smedley, armed with her notebook and pencil, “walked and ran with Chinese families as they evacuated, lane by lane, just ahead of the Japanese. In the background, bombs, gunfire, and sirens shook the city”). The author adeptly creates scenes that highlight the surreal miscellany of her subject’s life, as when Mao Zedong assists Smedley in ridding her cave of rats. The narration turns overly expositional at times, and a reader occasionally might have preferred to linger in various moments longer. But the book succeeds in illustrating the messiness of the early 20th century, when Smedley becomes simply one person among many attempting to fix the world with little more than her pen and her will.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-910688-00-7
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Holland House
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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