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
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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