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IN THE SHADOWS OF THE SUN

Second-novelist Parsons (Leaving Disneyland, 2001) unnecessarily overloads the scales: His sensitive evocation of historical...

War, dispossession and atomic fallout afflict a decent ranching family in 1940s New Mexico.

“Seems like we was bred for bad luck,” Ross Strickland comments—justifiably, although neither he nor his less taciturn brother Baylis initially grasps the magnitude of ruin bearing down on them and their Bar-X ranch. First, Ross’s son Jack enlists and is reported dead fighting in the Philippines. Then the War Department claims their land for a bombing range, expunging years of toil and investment. As the ordered universe implodes, so the Stricklands’ moral compass starts to fail. A feud with reprobate brothers Wink and Napoleon Seery, the Stricklands’ dark opposites, turns violent: Wink’s innocent son Felix is wounded, and then Ross guns down Napoleon in a claimed act of self-defense. But it is Jack, not dead but a prisoner of the Japanese, who is punished most harshly. Malnutrition, beatings, torture and wholesale slaughter are commonplace in the slave labor camps, which reduce him and his peers to their most atavistic selves. Jack finds camaraderie and survivor wisdom among Mexicans, Native Indians and other underdogs. “Maybe it’s better you don’t think about justice,” one sagely advises. Both Jack and Baylis witness the blistering flash of an atomic bomb detonation: Jack near Tokyo, his uncle close to Bar-X land. With Ross in prison and the family scattered, Baylis’s marriage falls apart, and the succor of a brief affair with his sister-in-law turns to corrosive guilt once Ross is released. Jack returns from the dead, a mere skeleton of himself, haunted by anger and more guilt. Ross’s hopes for the ranch are dashed when the War Office denies restitution of their land, and he dies in a car crash. This final blow irretrievably crushes Baylis, leaving to disfigured Felix and scarred Jack the burden of rediscovering a purpose.

Second-novelist Parsons (Leaving Disneyland, 2001) unnecessarily overloads the scales: His sensitive evocation of historical atrocities and a scouring way of life would be affecting enough without the pile-up of misery.

Pub Date: May 3, 2005

ISBN: 0-385-51244-9

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

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THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ

The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...

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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

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