by David Garland ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2006
A stick-figure cast speaking hopelessly wooden dialogue drains the life out of Garland’s tale—and the rest is history.
In book two of Garland’s saga (after Saratoga, 2005), the Brits frolic, the rebels freeze and the author falters.
Valley Forge—by now, it’s a great big iconic lump of a story that if treated conventionally will murder any attention span. So there’s Captain Jamie Skoyles (conventionally intrepid) of His Majesty’s 24th Foot, languishing in Cambridge, Mass., a prisoner of war, having been taken during the Battle of Saratoga. Unable to abide that shame, intrepid Jamie escapes: “Because it’s our duty as British soldiers,” he explains to a friend. Accompanied by his sweetheart, the almost, but not quite, as intrepid Elizabeth (she’s only a woman, after all), he makes his way to Philadelphia, where the skylarking General William Howe enjoys to the hilt the role of conqueror. Kept at bay is General George Washington’s brave but out-gunned band of insurrectionists. Valley Forge, 20 miles northeast of Philadelphia, is, of course, famously unpropitious as a place to spend a winter. Ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-fed, the penned-up Continentals grow increasingly ill-tempered due to an unappreciative and unforthcoming—in terms of the necessaries—Congress. Depression takes hold, desertions mount and yet the rag-tag army and the “damnably deficient Washington” have managed to distract Howe and his minions from their old time in the occupied city. Howe needs someone to get close to Washington, he tells Jamie, to “bamboozle” him, search out his weaknesses. Jamie agrees to become a spy, and so adept at it is he that the heretofore astute American general buys into an implausible cover and, if not actually bamboozled, teeters on the edge. And so it goes.
A stick-figure cast speaking hopelessly wooden dialogue drains the life out of Garland’s tale—and the rest is history.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-32722-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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BOOK REVIEW
by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
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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