A true Hamill piece: by turns fascinating, sentimental, hackneyed, and provincial in the best New York mode. It won’t play...
Journalist and author Hamill (the novel Loving Women, 1989; Why Sinatra Matters, 1998, etc.) offers a chronicle of 250 years of Manhattan life as experienced by an immortal Irish immigrant.
Growing up in the Ulster countryside in the 18th century, Robert Carson was constantly regaled with tales of the chieftains and warriors who’d fought over Erin across the centuries. As a Protestant, Robert was inclined to have more sympathy than most Irishmen with the English and Scots—until his mother was killed by the English Earl of Warren and Robert’s father revealed to him that his true name was Cormac O’Connor. The O’Connors have secretly preserved the Irish language and the ancient (pre-Christian) religion, and Cormac is now inducted into the family mysteries. Vowing revenge for his mother’s death, he sets off in pursuit of Warren but finds that he’s left for America. So Cormac boards ship and lands in Manhattan in 1741. Soon, he gets work in a printing shop run by a German immigrant named John Peter Zenger, eventually becoming a kind of journalist who roams the city’s back alleys and reports the gossip and events of the day. In the aftermath of a slave revolt, Cormac saves the life of an African magician and is granted the power of immortality—provided he never sets foot off Manhattan Island. Not a bad deal, since it allows the ever-observant Cormac to be eyewitness to some of history’s greatest spectacles—from the American Revolution to the Draft Riots, from the rise and fall of Tammany Hall to the stock market crash. Oh, and that business of September 11, 2001, too. Like all real New Yorkers, Cormac doesn’t mind being trapped in Manhattan: He’s doesn’t even know there’s anywhere else.
A true Hamill piece: by turns fascinating, sentimental, hackneyed, and provincial in the best New York mode. It won’t play in Poughkeepsie, but there are plenty of New Yorkers (and New York-ophiles) who will love it.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-34111-8
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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