Once again a master of historical military fiction has made real the sound and fury of the Civil War.
Civil War chronicler Peters (The Damned of Petersburg, 2016, etc.) once again writes of war in Technicolor, this time chronicling the blood-drenched chaos of close combat as Grant's Army of the Potomac forces the surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
Following the four earlier novels in Peters' series, this volume picks up the war near its end, taking us from March 25 to April 9, 1865, from retreat to surrender, as Peters dissects battles, skirmishes, and routs as Lee abandons Petersburg’s fortifications and is driven relentlessly to subjugation at Appomattox Courthouse. Each clash is distinct, a logical progression arising from Grant having assumed command of the Union Army, the first general to crank his resolve to the sticking place and relentlessly press Lee’s exhausted, starving, ever loyal troops—“these heroes who smelled like mules and fought like archangels.” This endgame is glimpsed mostly from the perspectives of each army’s brigadiers, colonels, and captains—some forever famous, like Joshua Chamberlain, hero of Gettysburg, and boy general George Custer, and others not. It’s the byplay of their skills and incompetencies, resentments and favoritisms that fuels both victory and defeat. Everyone gets his due, from Lincoln, his despair at last driven into shadows by Grant’s victories, to the runty cavalry general “Little Phil” Sheridan, self-aggrandizing at the expense of lesser generals who provided victories. Then there’s Lee himself, physically ill and haunted by the past, and Pickett, failure at Gettysburg, found wanting at Five Forks. The dialogue comes complete with soldierly vulgarities, and descriptions of the maelstroms of open field charges and hand-to-hand combat are so vivid—skulls shattered, guts spilled and trampled—that it seems as if Peters has handed out Springfield 1861 Rifles and pushed us to fill a slot in the skirmish line.
Once again a master of historical military fiction has made real the sound and fury of the Civil War.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8170-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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