Rousing, Indiana Jones’style debut thriller with scheming Nazis, hair-raising escapes, sweeping scenery, and romance in a volcanic cave. Seattle Times journalist Dietrich (Northwest Passage, 1995, etc.), who won a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Exxon Valdez disaster, goes to the last place left on earth for a WWII-era adventure: Antarctica, where, Dietrich adds in an afterword, Hermann Gîring actually sent a group of German explorers in 1938. In Dietrich’s fictional account, the Germans take with them American flyboy Owen Hart, whose previous attempt to fly across the South Pole ended in a humiliating failure. Owen, whom we first meet in Alaska after he crashes his plane, knows nothing of the Third Reich’s dark side. Eager for adventure, he goes to Berlin, where he meets Gîring, plays with Gîring’s electric train set, and falls for the beautiful and brainy Garbo-ish biologist, Greta Heinz. Alas, Greta seems to be pledged to the expedition’s commander, the compulsively Hitler-hailing SS Major Jurgen Drexler. Following an uneventful voyage to a continent Dietrich likens to a “dream that stung,” the ship is crippled after ramming an ice pack during an impromptu battle with a Norwegian whaler. The ship ties up for repairs at an uncharted volcanic island, where Owen encounters the creepy ruin of a Norwegian ship whose crew has been killed by a hideous infectious disease. Owen and Greta explore the island, discovering the disease’s antidote just as the Germans begin to become infected. After a tryst in a slime-filled cave, Owen and Greta are separated’she fleeing with Drexler, he forced to return with a bunch of suspicious Norwegians. The story then moves to the closing days of WWII, with Greta and Owen (now reunited) racing back to the deadly island to stop Drexler from using the disease against the Allies. A merry, melodramatic patchwork of adventure films that, when it isn’t evoking predictable cinematic thrills, rivals the page-turners of Alistair MacLean.
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 1998
ISBN: 0-446-52339-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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