A curious mélange of the sacred and profane, but always captivating when the sinners are onstage.
John the Baptist is an inspiring spiritual leader but a less-than-riveting protagonist in this fictional treatment from Hansen (The Monsters of St. Helena, 2003, etc.).
John’s parents, a cousin of the Virgin Mary and a priest of the Jerusalem Temple, despair of having children, but at an advanced age Elizabeth becomes pregnant. (An author’s note explains that Hansen was drawn to this subject by his own experiences with infertility, chronicled in The Brotherhood of Joseph, 2008.) Young John escapes Herod the Great’s slaughter of innocents to embark on his spiritual path. First he encounters the Nasurai, a monotheistic sect related to Zoroastrianism; later he joins the Essenes, an all-male enclave of celibate, vegetarian, teetotalling ascetics. Appalled by the corruption of Judaism, as evidenced by the Temple’s brisk trade in sacrificial lambs, John retreats to the wilderness, where he attracts disciples with his regimen of baptism and purification. While Christian doctrine depicts John as merely a forerunner of Christ, Hansen’s portrait is strongly influenced by the Gnostic teachings of a John-centered sect called the Mandeans, who view the Baptizer as superior in rigor and restraint to Jesus with his messy miracles and winemaking prowess. Hewing closely to this reverential assessment, the chapters on John read at times like screeds by Paulo Coelho (albeit much better written); they are outpaced by alternating scenes starring that thoroughly un-ascetic bunch, the semi-pagan Herod clan. A tempestuous, incestuous convergence of two royal Israelite dynasties produces Herod the Great, whose lingering death is recounted in lurid detail, and his son Herod Antipas, who schemes his way to the throne. Antipas’ niece Herodias beguiles him into marrying her, making a dangerous enemy of his first wife’s father, a neighboring king. Hansen downplays Antipas’ bond with the Baptist, dissipating some of the conflict surrounding his decision to deliver John’s head to his stepdaughter, pretty, passive-aggressive pawn Salome.
A curious mélange of the sacred and profane, but always captivating when the sinners are onstage.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06947-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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