A brutal, mesmerizing, and historically compelling war story with a fully drawn protagonist.
A historical novel brings readers deep into the agonizing battles of World War II’s final year on the European front and the trials in Germany following the Allied victory.
William Connelly was raised in privilege, part of Philadelphia’s Main Line elite. His grandfather was a penniless Irish immigrant who, through fortitude and good fortune, opened his own brickyard, which his two sons expanded into a prominent paving company. Now his uncle is a United States congressman. But despite his access to a safer stateside deployment, Will, an Army lieutenant with a law degree, ships out to join the 106th Infantry Division. In December 1944, Will is stationed in Belgium when word comes that the Germans, who had been in retreat, are mounting a major new offensive. Will unexpectedly finds himself thrust onto the battlefield, to which, despite being seriously wounded, he returns, in one capacity or another, until the end of the conflict on the European front. On May 5, 1945, two days before the official armistice, Will is ordered to help liberate a “prison” camp. The shock of what he finds in the Mauthausen concentration camp in northern Austria, even more than the brutalities he witnessed in combat, is a turning point for him. He remains in Germany for several more years, attached to Gen. George S. Patton’s JAG Corps, prosecuting war criminals. These trials, less well-known than the Nuremberg Tribunals, were held at the notorious Dachau concentration camp and are riveting. A bit less than half the book graphically depicts the excruciating details of battle. Familiar luminaries make appearances, but this portion of the narrative is propelled by action and gore—it’s highly informative but tough to read. The postwar section focuses more on the scars of war, the traumas that kept soldiers like Will rooted in place, unable to return home quickly after what they had witnessed. McNulty (The Parachutist’s Daughter, 2011) delivers a vivid, fully developed hero. The author is a skillful writer, both in prose and dialogue. A few missing words can be easily overlooked, although one linguistic quirk is puzzling: He consistently writes “padded” when “patted” is required (“Will padded him on the shoulder”).
A brutal, mesmerizing, and historically compelling war story with a fully drawn protagonist.Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9993788-4-7
Page Count: 444
Publisher: Bashton Publications
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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