Beyond that, little, really, is delved into, although the war, suffering and deprivation are vivid.
Only the second full-length novel from Bass (The Hermit’s Story, 2002), this takes an episode from Texas history that provides grit and suffering aplenty—while matters psychological remain generally unstirred.
In the 1830s, Texas has become an independent nation under the presidency of Sam Houston, but there’s still plenty of bad blood between the Mexicans and those new foreigners to the north. And so it is that after “a band of infidels, Mexican nationals,” cross the Rio Grande, attack San Antonio and flee, retaliation is called for. And when two military men, Captain Fisher and Captain Green, come through the town of LaGrange on the lookout for militiamen, even our 16-year-old narrator, surname of Alexander, and his friend James Shepherd join up. A band of 500 sets out, ostensibly to patrol the Rio Grande but in actuality—though known only to the commanders—to find revenge, an aim that leads to acts of wanton pillage, rapine and atrocity in Laredo and, such behavior being not yet sufficient, to the crossing of the river and invasion of Mexico as a harassing force. From there on, all goes downhill, as Jim Shepherd loses an arm, then his comradely goodness of character, then his life, and as the entire militia, defeated in battle in Ciudad Mier, is taken prisoner by the Mexicans. Near-starvation, exhaustion, attempts at escape (one of them through the mountains: a disaster)—all cut away at the number of survivors. Punishment at one point is the diezmo—the shooting of one in ten, decided by lot. Our narrator, though, somehow survives everything, including long and truly merciless imprisonment in the ungodly carved-from-a-mountain prison in Perote. After release, and after return home, “only a handful” remain of the 308 who crossed into Mexico. Now, at age 66 and telling the tale, the narrator wonders, “Why was I one of the tiny handful who survived the entire journey?”
Beyond that, little, really, is delved into, although the war, suffering and deprivation are vivid.Pub Date: May 13, 2005
ISBN: 0-395-92617-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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