Nevin loves his political details—perhaps a bit more than most readers will—but this is vivid storytelling about a time as...
Another lively look back at the newborn US by a historical novelist who respects both his disciplines.
Thomas Jefferson called it the Second Revolution—that period during which the new nation fought desperately to remain a democracy. The year is 1800; Jefferson has just thwarted John Adams’s bid for a second term in an election notable for its ideological bitterness. The two-party system grew out of it; class warfare took a great leap forward because of it. The Republicans, led by Jefferson and James Madison, passionate about the idea of government by ordinary people, find themselves in a death struggle with their former brothers in arms—the war against England had, after all, ended only 17 years earlier. Say “ordinary people” to the Federalists, led by Hamilton and Adams, and you evoke that fearsome French rabble making profligate use of the guillotine at the expense of extraordinary people not unlike the Federalists. As in the earlier novels of this series (Eagle’s Cry, 2000, etc.), Nevin’s characters are a judicious mix of the fictitious and the real, but none are more appealing than delicious, unabashedly ambitious Dolley Madison. She wants Jimmy Madison, her overworked, under-valued husband, to succeed Jefferson and doesn’t much care who knows it. But Burr, the incumbent vice-president, matches her in ambition, outstrips her—and virtually everyone else—in ruthlessness, and wants the presidency for himself, convinced it’s the greatness for which he was born. If stout-hearted Dolley is the heroine, Burr is the villain, but an endlessly complex one. Though fatally flawed, he’s charming, elegant, charismatic, basically good-hearted, a fearless risk-taker whose behavior is frequently admirable but who willfully, single-handedly almost destroys his country.
Nevin loves his political details—perhaps a bit more than most readers will—but this is vivid storytelling about a time as turbulent as it is generally neglected.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-85512-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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