While not having the epic scope of Shogun, Kirk’s novel is sure to be compared to Clavell’s work in its superb depiction of...
Kirk presents 17th-century Japan as a world imbued with stately rituals, unshakable principles and a rigid moral code.
Munisai Shinmen has faced an implacable enemy and has emerged with both body and honor intact, so his training as a samurai has served him well. Shortly after the first battle Kirk depicts, we get a sense of how the culture of honor operates when Lord Kanno, the defeated enemy, plaintively asks how to commit seppuku, for he doesn’t know how it’s done and he wishes to die an honorable death—he’s 9 years old. Violence is not confined to the battlefield, however, for an enraged Munisai has also killed his wife and her lover. Munisai eventually goes back to reclaim his young son, Bennosuke, whom he left eight years before in the care of Munisai’s brother Dorinbo, a Shinto monk. Though injured, Munisai takes over his son’s training, and the youngster (he’s only 13) begins to realize his promise as a future samurai when he defeats Kihei Arima (aka “Lightning Hand”), who’s already killed six men in single combat and is eager to add a seventh. Issues of honor re-emerge when Munisai presents himself to his lord, Hideie Ukita, to commit seppuku for one of Bennosuke’s transgressions. Kirk instills the ritual with great dignity as Munisai commits the ultimate act to “expunge all shame.” Bennosuke then continues to confirm his stance as a celebrated samurai by participating in the battle of Sekigahara and claiming a “new” identity as Musashi Miyamoto, one of the most renowned swordsmen in samurai history.
While not having the epic scope of Shogun, Kirk’s novel is sure to be compared to Clavell’s work in its superb depiction of samurai culture.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-53663-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Admirers of Ferrante’s work will eagerly await the third volume.
Roman à clef by the reclusive author who writes under the name Elena Ferrante (The Lost Daughter, 2008, etc.): a beautifully written portrait of a sometimes difficult friendship.
Set, as is so much of her work, in her native Naples, Italy, Ferrante’s latest is a study in the possibility of triumph over disappointment. Its narrator, Elena Greco, is the daughter of a man who has managed by dint of hard work to rise only to the lowly position of porter at the city government building. Elena is brilliant, but less so than her friend Raffaella Cerullo, called—confusingly, for readers without Italian—Lila or Lina depending on who is talking. Both women, born in the year of liberation, 1944, are ambitious, whip-smart, as at home in the pages of Aristotle as in the hills of their still-battered city. Their native milieu is poor and barely literate, but both have emerged from it, despite the distractions afforded by the boys they like and the violence occasionally visited by those whom they don’t. Lina has always outpaced Elena in every way, not least intellectually; as Elena recalls, “I saw that after half a page of the philosophy textbook she was able to find surprising connections between Anaxagoras, the order that the intellect imposes on the chaos of things, and Mendeleev’s tables.” That chaos, in the first volume of the trilogy to which this volume belongs, swept Lina away from her ambitions toward a domesticity that seems almost arbitrary, while Elena, the very definition of a survivor, forged on. Lina, it appears, will always consider her the lesser of equals, someone who, Elena frets, “couldn’t even imagine that I might change.” Yet, as Ferrante recounts, it is late-blooming Elena whose turn it is to flourish, despite setbacks and false starts; this second book closes with her embarking on what promises to be a brilliant literary career and with the hint that true love may not be far behind.
Admirers of Ferrante’s work will eagerly await the third volume.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60945-134-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
SEEN & HEARD
A thorough and well-researched if sometimes flowery saga of the Jefferson family.
A Founding Father’s daughter tells all!
At the age of 10, upon the death of her mother, Patsy Jefferson steps into the role of mistress of the house for her father, Thomas. Patsy, our narrator, recounts the story of a man of great contradictions. He proclaims his love for domestic life but is repeatedly drawn to public service and repeatedly fails to manage his great estate, Monticello, losing it after his death to creditors. Then there is the matter of his slaves—“Our slave-holding spokesman for freedom,” taunts a schoolmate of Patsy’s when Jefferson serves as an American envoy in Paris. His hypocrisy includes a long-standing affair with Sally Hemings, who was not only his slave, but his wife’s sister. Authors Dray (Daughters of the Nile, 2013, etc.) and Kamoie (Irons in the Fire, 2007) have performed tireless research. Whether it's detailing Patsy’s life as a debutante in Paris, where she dances with Lafayette and witnesses the first flickers of the French Revolution, or recounting the world of a Virginia plantation, they've done their homework. Indeed, their fidelity to history can be excessive: so many Virginia cousins, scandals, and disinheritances can weary the reader, especially when the prose takes a sappy turn (“Watching him struggle against undeserved abuse from such a villain made me forgive him, truly”). Patsy marries her cousin Tom Randolph and bears him 11 children while enduring his abuse, but she remains most devoted to maintaining her father’s happiness, property, and legacy.
A thorough and well-researched if sometimes flowery saga of the Jefferson family.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234726-8
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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