A worthy historical re-creation: Hanson has high-minded purposes in depicting the triumph of democracy over dictatorship,...
Classicist, farmer and conservative commentator Hanson (The Soul of Battle, 1999, etc.) turns to fiction to tell the tale of Sparta’s final days.
Mêlon—his name means “apple” in Greek, on which a bit of prophecy at the beginning of the novel turns—is a farmer from the district of Thespiai who lays down his plowshare and picks up a sword when the need arises. Epaminondas, the commander of the Theban forces, is mighty glad of it, too, for when Mêlon arrives at the battlefield of Leuktra, he is the moral equivalent of 1,000 men: “The presence of Mêlon, the apple, would win over the hesitant horsemen and the scared farmers and the ignorant tanners and potters as well.” The slight against tanners and potters notwithstanding, Mêlon is a fellow who knows his business on the battlefield, a philosophical soul who reflects that war “is the great torch that brings such heat and light to everything and everyone.” Yet, like some Stonewall Jackson of old, he isn’t quite certain about Epaminondas’ program of freeing the slaves—the helots, or “seized ones”—of Sparta, which seems a touch radical to him. No matter: Mêlon is a good soldier, and he eventually buys into the program. Along the way, he meets with all manner of characters who help serve Hanson’s purpose of delivering genuine history within the Trojan horse of an action-packed war story, including a prostitute who doesn’t have a heart of gold, but who could easily afford to buy one with her fabulous wealth; Epaminondas, ambitious and shrewd, with a gift for poetry; and various Spartans, servants of an evil empire about to go up in a cloud of smoke.
A worthy historical re-creation: Hanson has high-minded purposes in depicting the triumph of democracy over dictatorship, but there’s plenty of exciting swordplay, too.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60819-164-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
