History at its beguiling best. More to come.
Ancient, patient Egypt adapts its new overseer Ptolemy and his hyper-Greek family to suit the needs of an older and subtler civilization: a wise and often amusing re-creation by Sprott (The Rise of Mr. Warde, 1992, etc.).
In the disassembly of Alexander the Great’s empire, Egypt, the richest prize, goes to the late emperor’s best general, Ptolemy. It’s a very good deal for the middle-aged Macedonian, who is, to tell the truth, tired of having no home other than a roaming army. He’s ready to put down roots. And Egypt is ready for him. Egypt is ready for anything, because Egypt, and particularly her priests, understand everything and know that everything must be the way it is, which is to say, the way it has been. Until recently, there have always been pharaohs, but the native royal family has died out. High priest Anemhor begins the long-term task of converting the thoughtful but typically rambunctious soldier into the embodiment of a timeless culture. It’s a tall order. Polite, politically sensitive, and keen to do a good job as the not-quite-regal Satrap, Ptolemy is Greek to his bones and has not the slightest interest in becoming a god. He is, however, interested in a family other than the bastard children sired out of the internationally adored courtesan Thais, who was left behind somewhere in the Asian campaigns. Eurydike, the dynastically advantageous bride he sends for from Greece, turns out to be fecund but boring. She’s also skinny and doesn’t dance. But she has brought her aunt Berenike, whose hard life is about to get much, much better. Berenike is interested in everything around her, and her new setup suits her well. The shopworn chaperone blossoms, putting on pounds in the right places, and becomes, first, Ptolemy’s most trusted adviser, then his mistress, and, at last his number-one wife. Worn down by Anemhor, Ptolemy accepts the regal title late in life, but even as a divine being he’s unable to keep his children from each other’s throats or, disastrously, beds.
History at its beguiling best. More to come.Pub Date: May 14, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4154-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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