Emmett Till was a 14-year-old black Chicagoan whose lynching in 1955 in Mississippi outraged much of the nation. Moore (previously known for her memoir, Sweet Summer, 1989) here fictionalizes his story without, curiously, ever explicitely acknowledging this ``little nobody who shook up the world.'' Lily and Floyd Cox are young marrieds and poor whites in Hopewell, Mississippi, in 1955. Floyd owns a run-down shack of a pool hall patronized by black sharecroppers. Armstrong Todd is a 15-year-old black kid raised in Chicago, visiting with his grandmother. He speaks some French in Lily's presence in the pool hall; this is uppity enough to draw the wrath of the Coxes. The insecure Floyd proves his manhood to his father and brother by beating and then shooting Armstrong in their presence. Clayton Pinochet, son of plantation owner Stonewall and guilt-racked closet liberal, makes sure the story goes national by telephoning (secretly) a New York reporter. Meanwhile, Armstrong's mother, Delotha, insists that her boy be buried in Chicago, where there's a huge funeral. Floyd is tried and found not guilty, but his business is ruined by a boycott. Delotha heads south, seeking vengeance, but changes her mind en route. Moore tells all this briskly (it's her one strength), while capturing only a fraction of the terror and downplaying the brutality: Till was disfigured almost beyond recognition. Having used up her core material quickly (poor pacing), she fills the novel's second half (which ends in 1988) with soap-opera (the marital problems of the Todds and the Coxes) and a glib picture of the New South, embodied in Lily's spunky daughter Doreen, who joins her black sisters on a picket line (``I ain't scared of being raped by Willie Horton, Mama. I'm scared of not having medical benefits''). This would be just another unmemorable first novel were it not for its crass exploitation of one of America's foremost victims of racism. Till, and the Movement, deserve better.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-399-13746-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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