An impressive blend of history and fiction in need of additional editing.
Snell’s Civil War novel documents the savage treatment of prisoners of war.
George Corbett joins the 8th Virginia Cavalry in 1861 and reluctantly permits his 15-year-old son, Harley, to follow suit. In 1863, the two are separated in the fog of battle, and Harley is shot in the arm and taken prisoner by Union soldiers. He’s transported to Point Lookout, Maryland, and incarcerated in a prisoners-of-war camp, the conditions of which are ghastly. Prisoners routinely face physical abuse, starvation, and squalid filth. George, tortured by guilt over his son’s fate, becomes hopeful when he learns that Gen. Lee has hatched a covert plan to rescue the 20,000 POWs, a perilously risky venture made all the more dangerous when the Union soldiers discover it and prepare for the attack. The tide of war has turned against the South, and the Confederacy is in desperate need of soldiers. Harley is imprisoned with his Uncle Steve—nicknamed “Devil Steve” for his penchant for brutal violence. Steve undergoes macabre abuse by a former slave, Big Jake Brown, who became a Union soldier and guard at the camp. Jake was once ferociously beaten by Steve before he killed his owners and escaped, and he intends to exact retribution. Debut author Snell’s meticulous research is nothing short of remarkable. He studied official camp inspection reports, period memoirs, and even visited the historical sites in question in order to paint an authentic portrait of the prison’s barbarity. With the exception of Steve’s monstrously deformed character, the author paints a morally nuanced picture of both sides. George’s inner conflict is a good example of this authorial sensitivity. An educated Southerner, he can’t help but find slavery repugnant, but he still practices slavery and chooses to fight for the Confederacy. The novel reads like an uncorrected draft: the dialogue is written in historically appropriate dialect while the narration largely isn’t, though it lapses inexplicably into it occasionally. Also, while the table of contents provides pagination, the pages themselves are left unnumbered.
An impressive blend of history and fiction in need of additional editing.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973267-23-2
Page Count: 431
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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