A rip-roarin’ read, and inspiration to go and sack a few cities on your own.
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan…well, before all that, he had to take care of some nasty business, the subject of Hun-meister Iggulden’s (Emperor, 2003, etc.) latest installment in his series of novels devoted to the Golden Horde.
Here’s how to be a Hun in a few easy steps. First, kill anyone who gets between you and power. Second, rape and pillage. Third, practice saying meaty things, such as, “The world cannot be full of lead dogs, or the pack would pull itself apart.” Just so. But in the family of Temujin, or Genghis Khan, everyone wants to be the alpha Mongol, and, as Iggulden’s novel opens, the grandchildren are squabbling over who gets to be the grand poobah. The heroes of the piece, early on, are those who keep their heads and hold their allegiances close to their chests, such as the courtier named Ochir, who counsels one scion, “There must be no struggle for power, Guyuk, such as there was between your father and his brother.” Well, fat chance: This is medieval Mongolia, after all, and in those days before television, there was no better pastime than struggling for the throne. Iggulden is skilled at depicting the back and forth, and there’s even the historical fiction equivalent of a mysterian’s red herring in his steering the reader to back the wrong horse—uh, khan—until we finally get to the one who shows the most promise of surviving the internecine, interfamilial unpleasantness, a sturdy chap named Kublai, who intones lines that John Wayne himself (see The Conqueror) would be proud to utter: “He was khan, Orlok. Give him a funeral pyre to light up the sky.” Iggulden lacks some of the grace and sinew that inform the historical novels of Mary Renault or Robert Graves, but he’s made a very close study of the workings of power and its infinite abilities to corrupt infinitely, and his understanding shows on every page. Besides, he’s pretty good at the blood-and-guts stuff, the flying columns and whistling arrows and spurting blood that makes for a good battle scene.
A rip-roarin’ read, and inspiration to go and sack a few cities on your own.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-34305-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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