Markert’s weakness for murderous melodrama trivializes a dark time in medical history.
A tuberculosis epidemic, as seen through the eyes of a sanatorium doctor driven by his love of God and music.
According to the author of this first novel, Waverly Hills Tuberculosis Sanatorium was a real place on a hilltop outside Louisville, Ky. The locals were fearful of the white wind blowing down on them. In the winter of 1929, two doctors handle 500 patients. Some will leave symptom-free, but more will die. Dr. Wolfgang Pike finds playing his harmonica or violin soothes his patients. The 31-year-old doctor inherited his love of music from his Protestant father; where Wolfgang differed was in his embrace of Catholicism. His pursuit of the priesthood faltered when he met the lovely Rose outside a cathedral. The two young Catholics ministered to soldiers during the great flu epidemic of 1918. They married; five years later, Wolfgang lost Rose in a traffic accident. By then, the seminarian was a doctor, still hoping to become a priest one day. At Waverly, his hectic life is further burdened by Ku Klux Klan members harassing him. They burn a cross outside the nearby “colored” hospital. Their mischief is counterbalanced by the arrival of a new patient, McVain, an ornery guy but a talented pianist. Soon, the novel settles into the familiar groove of an inspirational work. McVain overcomes his bigotry to play with a black flutist and a Jewish violinist. Wolfgang organizes the healthier patients into a choir; there will be a concert. Naturally, there are setbacks; the senior doctor is opposed, and there’s even a horrific lynching, but the concert is a triumph for conductor Wolfgang and pianist McVain, even though they are the last notes he will ever play. The action is not quite over. Wolfgang succumbs to carnal temptation for the second time and marries a nurse, Susannah. This one will be a brief marriage, as her tuberculosis proves fatal.
Markert’s weakness for murderous melodrama trivializes a dark time in medical history.Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4022-7837-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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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