Rip-roaring, entertaining image of a bygone era that deserves Pulitzer consideration.
The short, brilliant life of jazz legend Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke, in a yeasty first novel by the veteran poet and nonfiction author (The Culture of Hope, 1995, etc.).
1929 is a richly detailed story of an age of excess, framed by the memories of aged Henry Wise (born Hermann Weiss), a survivor who had worked as road manager for Bix’s touring band in the late 1920s, and whose sister “Hellie” had, like Bix, been caught up in the period’s fractious, perilous energies. Initially, we see the somewhat opaque Bix as others see him: a “natural” musician of unprecedented gifts, a hopeless alcoholic since adolescence, adored and egged on by admirers, driven both by a manifest death wish and by his dream of composing “serious” music (“ . . . something to be remembered for, not that … other stuff”). Turner, whose inspiration by E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime is everywhere apparent, creates some terrific set pieces, ranging from 1926 Chicago under the murderous thumb of “Scarface” Al Capone and minions like “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn (who’ll become Hellie’s lover, and nemesis) to Hollywood, where the Paul Whiteman orchestra (in which Bix labors) is engaged for the first all-musical talking picture, to the several drying-out facilities where Bix’s Iowa parents and concerned colleagues try, and fail, to divert him from his self-destructive path. There are notable cameo appearances by, among others, Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. (“Peter Pan with muscles”), Maurice Ravel (who, in a splendid scene, is taken to the Cotton Club to hear the Duke Ellington band), and “It” Girl Clara Bow (whose seduction of the probably virginal Bix raises the novel’s already elevated temperature several more degrees). And the elegiac final 50 or so pages have the soaring, surprising intensity of a honey-throated Beiderbecke solo.
Rip-roaring, entertaining image of a bygone era that deserves Pulitzer consideration.Pub Date: June 15, 2003
ISBN: 1-58243-265-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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