It's still a pretty good book, especially in its lively first half. Ehrlich has invaded Thomas Berger’s territory and...
The recent glut of fiction grounded in American history continues apace with this entertaining second novel from the author of Big Government (1998), purportedly the story of ‘the previously unknown first draft’ of our 18th president's published Memoirs.
Ehrlich's protagonist and narrator is in reality, we're assured, Hiram Ulysses Grant, an underachieving misfit who profited from a tragic accident by appropriating the identity of his much-admired namesake and neighbor—renowned as ‘Useful,’ in contrast to his usurper (locally dubbed ‘Useless’). If you buy this particular stretcher, you'll enjoy Ehrlich's/Useless's vividly detailed re-creations of Grant's serendipitous career at West Point, distinguished service in the Mexican War (a sequence that compares interestingly with Jeff Shaara's Gone for Soldiers, p. 506), business failures and descent into alcoholism, greater military success as Civil War Commander of the Union Army of the Potomac, and postwar tenure as a chief executive hamstrung by widespread graft and `an endless parade of speculators, victimized Negroes, and displaced Indians.’ Ehrlich gives this Grant a marvelously flexible and sardonic colloquial voice, and enlivens his story with briskly retold heroic tales (the campaigns of Shiloh and Vicksburg are especially well depicted). There are several fine flinty characterizations, notably that of Grant's military colleague (and perhaps dark other half ?), the foulmouthed, manic-depressive General William T. Sherman. But two grievous errors stand out: Ehrlich's inexplicable decision to portray Abraham Lincoln as a cackling, vainglorious redneck (a blot on the novel barely qualified by Grant's later testimony to Lincoln's greatness), and the several coincidental reappearances, in different circumstances and guises, of ‘the real’ Ulysses S. Grant—and the manner in which this eccentric plot constituent is permitted to jerry-rig the harshly ironic conclusion.
It's still a pretty good book, especially in its lively first half. Ehrlich has invaded Thomas Berger’s territory and emerged (as might be expected) without victory, but without disgracing himself either.Pub Date: June 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-446-52387-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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