Brisk, engrossing, vintage Buckley (Brothers No More, 1995, etc.). Given that it’s a tale unabashedly partisan, it is – for...
A fictional portrait of Joe McCarthy – sympathetic but not sanitized – in which clay feet replace cloven hooves.
Here’s 20 year-old McCarthy needing to pass a written exam in order to get back into high school. But he’s not good at written exams. To him, it seems more efficient simply to draft a friend to take the test for him. Some years later, running for his first elective office and facing a popular incumbent, he informs the tax-jittery electorate that his rival has earned between $175,000 and $200,000. He neglects to add that it took 20 years for this sum to accrue. Sharp dealing, half-truths, and innuendoes abound, and McCarthy detractors will point to these as the mark of the man. But Buckley wants his readers to see McCarthy through the eyes of Harry Bontecou, the novel’s second-string hero. Harry, young, brilliant, politically conservative, and fervently anti-Soviet, views McCarthy as standing in the nation’s first line of defense against an enemy far too lightly regarded. It’s the man’s constancy, courage, and foresight that draw Harry to him. To Harry (as to McCarthy), it’s clear that only fools or villains can doubt that “loyalty risks” operate in the State Department, shaping (and corrupting) American foreign policy. Harry signs on with the redhunting senator, and through him we witness most of the events constituting his meteoric rise and calamitous fall in just a four-year period starting in 1950. We watch the offstage McCarthy as well – the easygoing charmer, the blindly loyal friend, the smitten lover, the hapless drunk. And then, at the climactic Army-McCarthy hearings, we see him come apart, the victim of his own excesses. But, according to his friend Harry, he’s never small-minded or mean-spirited.
Brisk, engrossing, vintage Buckley (Brothers No More, 1995, etc.). Given that it’s a tale unabashedly partisan, it is – for the most part – surprisingly credible. (Author tour)Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-11589-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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