A worthy but overstuffed saga about Maryland before and after the birth of America.
A novel explores the history of Maryland, from Colonial times through the end of the War of 1812, as experienced by members of the fictional Kerr family.
In 1634, the first Lord Baltimore, George Calvert, received a land grant from King Charles I, a parcel carved out of the colony of Virginia. Calvert’s goal was to create a haven for
Roman Catholics, who faced persecution in England. His vision was for Maryland to be a colony in which “everyone would own a large estate, and live the life of an English aristocrat.” That is not how it turned out, of course, but Maryland’s original commitment to the concept of religious freedom brought in a wide mix of immigrants searching for a new start. This book’s family saga begins with patriarch Simon de Coeur, who leaves Spain for France in 1590. His son and grandson eventually depart France for better prospects in England. At the end of the 17th century, great-grandson Emmanuel Coeur (the family name will later be changed to Kerr) is rejected as a proper suitor for a daughter of the aristocratic St. James family—he is not of high birth and is a Catholic to boot. Heartbroken and angry, he heads to Maryland. There, he begins what will grow into one of the most successful mercantile businesses in the colony, somewhat inauspiciously by becoming a smuggler and, when necessary, a privateer (a government-sanctioned pirate). There is a lot of history packed into Hart’s (Lacey Blue and the Rejects, 2013, etc.) novel—perhaps too much. By the time Emmanuel arrives in Maryland, the reader has already perused more than a third of the book and endured long lessons in French and British royal lineages and misadventures. The story provides intriguing background for an assortment of characters who will eventually interact with the Kerrs, but this material also clutters the flow of the fictional narrative. The most compelling sections of Hart’s work, which constitute the second half of the volume, deal with Maryland’s pivotal role in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 and the lengthy philosophical arguments between sequential generations of Kerr fathers and sons about the economic underpinnings of the two conflicts.
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-68256-111-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: LitFire Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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