Buffs will love it; the audience could go wider.
Veteran YA author Carter’s first adult title is the fascinating story of a ferocious three-day battle, among the bloodiest ever fought on US soil. No, not Gettysburg.
Six months before Gettysburg, there was Stones River, near Nashville, in which 44,000 Union troops and 37,700 Confederates hammered away at each other, savagely and unremittingly, and yet so indecisively that at the end both sides could claim victory and make a case for it. Casualties for the Union army numbered 13,200; for the Confederate, somewhat fewer—10,500—but when the Rebs left the field, the Yanks were still there. As was the case so often during this war, Stones River furnished a bitter contrast between the leaders and those led; between incredible acts of commitment and bravery and stunning ineptitude—an imbalance Carter places at the heart of his tale.. (No fictitious protagonists here: all Carter’s important characters are for real.) At the head of the Union’s Army of the Cumberland was Major General William Rosecrans, a sometimes brilliant but dangerously erratic field commander; his opposite number was Major General Braxton Bragg, surely one of the least popular, most blunder-prone figures in the Confederate army. In both camps, thirst for rank was virtually unquenchable, envy and jealousy the inevitable precursors to the virulent back-biting that all too often got men killed. Among the Confederates, there was that extra, cultural testiness inherent in the idea of Southern honor. “My God,” says one cavalier in a moment of agonized insight, “we are violent men . . . No wonder our generals risk such headlong attacks and our men carry them out with such utter disregard for life.” Carter’s theme—war is hell—is familiar enough, yet ever fresh when rendered, as it is here, with the kind of creative force that amounts to a sense of mission.
Buffs will love it; the audience could go wider.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56947-355-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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