A rip-roarin’ read, and inspiration to go and sack a few cities on your own.
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan…well, before all that, he had to take care of some nasty business, the subject of Hun-meister Iggulden’s (Emperor, 2003, etc.) latest installment in his series of novels devoted to the Golden Horde.
Here’s how to be a Hun in a few easy steps. First, kill anyone who gets between you and power. Second, rape and pillage. Third, practice saying meaty things, such as, “The world cannot be full of lead dogs, or the pack would pull itself apart.” Just so. But in the family of Temujin, or Genghis Khan, everyone wants to be the alpha Mongol, and, as Iggulden’s novel opens, the grandchildren are squabbling over who gets to be the grand poobah. The heroes of the piece, early on, are those who keep their heads and hold their allegiances close to their chests, such as the courtier named Ochir, who counsels one scion, “There must be no struggle for power, Guyuk, such as there was between your father and his brother.” Well, fat chance: This is medieval Mongolia, after all, and in those days before television, there was no better pastime than struggling for the throne. Iggulden is skilled at depicting the back and forth, and there’s even the historical fiction equivalent of a mysterian’s red herring in his steering the reader to back the wrong horse—uh, khan—until we finally get to the one who shows the most promise of surviving the internecine, interfamilial unpleasantness, a sturdy chap named Kublai, who intones lines that John Wayne himself (see The Conqueror) would be proud to utter: “He was khan, Orlok. Give him a funeral pyre to light up the sky.” Iggulden lacks some of the grace and sinew that inform the historical novels of Mary Renault or Robert Graves, but he’s made a very close study of the workings of power and its infinite abilities to corrupt infinitely, and his understanding shows on every page. Besides, he’s pretty good at the blood-and-guts stuff, the flying columns and whistling arrows and spurting blood that makes for a good battle scene.
A rip-roarin’ read, and inspiration to go and sack a few cities on your own.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-34305-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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