Poyer, a former Navy captain, knows his ships, of course, but his cast is strong besides, and his grip on the tiller of...
A stirring story of the Civil War—maritime style—as told by savvy veteran Poyer (China Sea, 2000, etc.) in the first of an ambitious trilogy.
Except for the zealots and the hotheaded sunshine patriots, it’s a war few want, but in the spring of 186l it seems inescapable. And good people, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, are forced to scrutinize positions they had thought fully settled. Aboard the Navy sloop Owanee, for instance, there are two such: the captain and his executive officer, both men of honor, both career officers, but both also Virginian-born and -bred. And on the day that young Elisha Eaker, recently of Harvard University, reports for duty, only one of the two has made up his mind. Though Captain Trezevant’s love for his home commonwealth is hardly a secret, he’s told no one that he intends to resign his commission, a fact that will complicate life for all the ship’s company. Eli, too, has some difficult decisions to make. His, however, have little to do with the war. He has to decide whether the affection he feels for his childhood sweetheart is really strong enough for marriage. And he has to decide whether he will allow his arrogant, plutocratic, tyrannical father to continue going on forever without a confrontation. When guns open fire on Fort Sumter, the war few want breaks out for real. Captain Trezevant leaves the Owanee. Reluctantly, his exec, Lieutenant Claiborne, takes command. Eli becomes gunnery officer, and to his own considerable surprise performs efficiently, even valiantly. Finally, on the last day of that fateful April, volume number one slips safely into harbor, all plot lines neatly advanced and yet satisfactorily in flux.
Poyer, a former Navy captain, knows his ships, of course, but his cast is strong besides, and his grip on the tiller of Civil War history appears reassuringly firm.Pub Date: July 5, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-87133-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
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
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