There is much good here but much to wade through.
This earnest historical novel traces an unusual nexus of influential German men behind social and political trends from the late 19th century to the early 1930s.
With his ugly title, scholar’s prose, homiletic dialogue, and dire clichés, Duberman (Hold Tight Gently, 2014, etc.), a professor of history emeritus at the City University of New York, heaps up impedimenta in the way of enjoying what are at bottom some fascinating wrinkles in the belle epoque and the years leading to Hitler’s emergence. It “isn’t quite” a historical novel, as Duberman concedes in an Author’s Note, but a “tapestry of interlocking personalities” in which he has let his period research point him “to presumptively ‘likely’ feelings and opinions” for his main characters. They are Count Harry Kessler, an active diarist and a wealthy player in contemporary art as patron and collector; Walter Rathenau, the head of the AEG industrial powerhouse and rare heterosexual in the narrative; and Magnus Hirschfeld, a leader in the growing field of sexology and in efforts to kill Germany’s Paragraph 175, which criminalizes sex between men. Duberman traces the predominantly gay coterie of noblemen surrounding Kaiser Wilhelm II. A “hard-hitting” muckraking newsman and nasty libel trials spark moral outrage that the German ruler shrugs off, while his bellicose shipbuilding competition with the British lights a fuse to WWI. Kessler seems to know every major artist and most writers in Europe. He collaborates with Hugo von Hofmannsthal on the libretto of Der Rosenkavalier. A Berlin salon brings him and Rathenau together, and their conversational fencing over politics and culture allows Duberman to pause his heavy chronicle for perfectly theme-serving chats. For a time there is more tolerance of gays than of Jews in Germany, although Rathenau manages to rise high because of his industrial clout and diplomatic skills. As the brown shirts hit the fan, even ham-fisted clichés—“the elephant is now decidedly in the room”—can’t distract from the horror of the rising violence against queers and Jews and other Germans. Duberman distills it nicely in the assassination of Rathenau and the huge funeral that followed, leading for a brief time to a Germany that might not end up embracing Adolf.
There is much good here but much to wade through.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60980-738-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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