A compelling read about a pivotal event in American history, movingly rendered with solid characters.
This historical fiction shows the human side of a devastating war, with the Battle of Gettysburg as seen by the town’s residents.
In 1856, in the quiet town of Gettysburg, Pa., 15-year-old Wes Culp is in love with Ginnie Wade. Bullied by Jack Skelly for being short, Wes moves to Virginia when his boss moves his carriage business south. Wes and Ginnie remain faithful to each other, but then comes the Civil War. Still in Virginia, Wes joins the Confederate army under Gen. Stonewall Jackson. Ginnie, shocked at Wes’ decision, gets engaged to Jack, who’s in the Union Army. While being a soldier is a first thrilling to Wes, the war starts to take its toll. Battle by battle, Wes and Jack become hardened veterans, increasingly numb to the horrors around them. Finally, after years on the march, Wes and Jack return home as the two armies converge on Gettysburg. In this story based on real events and the lives of real people, the father and son authors tell an engaging story using clear, solid research. The focus is on individuals—their thoughts, their hopes, their families—and their portraits are realistically crafted. Amid the well-rendered details of domestic life, the dialogue is especially impressive, and the narrative, though mostly workmanlike, is frequently gripping. The authors’ afterword on the real people behind the characters makes the story all the more heartbreaking. There are a few narrative lapses, however. Despite some effective fighting scenes, the reader has little sense of what’s happening in the war as a whole, and the main action in Gettysburg happens off stage. While this may be accurate for the characters’ lives, it takes away both from the drama and the reader’s understanding of the events portrayed. Interestingly, there are no slave or freed-slave characters at all; again, this may be accurate, but their absence, particularly in the Virginia-set scenes, should be explained.
A compelling read about a pivotal event in American history, movingly rendered with solid characters.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-1771430319
Page Count: 264
Publisher: CCB Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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