MOON OF BITTER COLD

Name: MOON OF BITTER COLD
Author: Frederick J. Chiaventone
ISBN: 0-765-30093-1

by Frederick J. Chiaventone ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2001

A microscopic examination that sets the entire Indian conflict in new light: gritty, evenhanded, starkly unsentimental view...

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Dramatic tragedy about Wyoming’s Fetterman Massacre, told in meticulously accurate, unsparingly gruesome detail by an eminent military historian.

On a cold day in December 1866, the pugnacious Lieutenant Colonel William Fetterman set out with 80 armed men from Fort Phil Kearney on the Bozeman Trail (just a few miles south of the Bighorn mountains, where Custer would meet his doom ten years later), and, against orders, tried to kill members of an Indian raiding party when he was ambushed by a diverse group of tribal warriors, Crazy Horse among them. Though the Indians suffered losses (the battle’s Indian name is The Fight of One Hundred Dead), Fetterman’s force was wiped out and hideously mutilated. Chiaventone (International Security/US Army Command College) shows that, though Fetterman himself was in fact a hot-headed fool, his commander, Colonel Henry Carrington, struggled valiantly afterward to keep an uneven peace with a variety of tribal adversaries, most notably Red Cloud, portrayed by Chiaventone as an explosively violent, hateful chief spoiling for a fight in the hope that an easy victory against the settlers would solidify his shaky position within the tribes. In what is essentially a prequel to his excellent novel of Custer at the Little Bighorn, A Road We Do Not Know (1996), Chiaventone points out that by severely underestimating their adversaries, both sides hastened on a horrific road to ruin. The story ends on a sad, almost wistful note as, years later, Red Cloud and Carrington encounter each other at the battlefield, where they wonder whether so much unnecessary bloodshed was the result of human frailties—or simply foreordained.

A microscopic examination that sets the entire Indian conflict in new light: gritty, evenhanded, starkly unsentimental view of good intentions—on both sides—gone bad.

Pub Date: April 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-765-30093-1

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Forge

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

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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.