A star-spangled banner of a follow-up to the historian- author's Dream West (1984) brings to vivid life a turning-point in American history. In a resonant narrative limning the sectionalism and discontents that threatened the young republic barely three decades after the revolution that created it, Nevin focuses on three central figures: President James Madison (sustained in crucial ways by his beloved Dolley); General Andrew Jackson (gentled as well as cherished by his Rachel); and Winfield Scott (a precocious military talent whose strong opinions bring him into frequent conflict with his colleagues). When events draw a deeply divided America into war with England, the wispy chief executive shows himself to be a principled man of strong convictions as he battles not only British armed forces but also recalcitrant New Englanders (whose lucrative trade with the erstwhile mother country has been disrupted), and states' rights frontiersmen like Jackson who distrust Madison's vision of the federal union's future. With emotional assistance from Dolley, the President manages to keep the ship of state on an even keel during a series of early setbacks in the War of 1812; concurrently, Scott learns the close-combat lessons that will lead to later victories along the Canadian border, and the volatile Jackson raises an army of irregulars who, defying the odds, mount successful campaigns in southern woodlands against Indian bands backed by the British. Before the tide turns, however, vengeful redcoats sack Washington, D.C., and raze the White House, forcing Madison and his government to flee. Bloodied but unbowed, the president rallies the nation, and Jackson stages an epic defense of New Orleans against British invaders at the start of 1815. A war- weary England agrees to peace, allowing a now-united America to pursue its manifest destiny in the West. A brilliantly realized chronicle that gives a human scale to the author's panoramic canvas. A considerable achievement and one that transcends genre. ($150,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: July 4, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-85510-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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