Great small-town period detail with standard-issue courtroom scenes, a few too many stock characters, and an appropriately...
Absorbing but by-the-numbers courtroom melodrama, with all the moral complexities, last-minute revelations, and gavel-pounding histrionics that the genre requires.
The Wake of the Perdido Star (1999), actor Hackman’s debut fiction with his underwater archaeologist writing partner Lenihan, was a high-seas swashbuckler that, if not for Patrick O’Brian, could have been called the kind of novel nobody writes anymore. The team’s second historical tale recalls classic American courtroom thrillers from To Kill a Mockingbird to Intruder in the Dust, but is closer to John Grisham's recent Faulkner-Lite efforts. Though set in 1929 in a nostalgically described Illinois hamlet, the story of Boyd Carter, a hapless trolley car operator on trial for the shooting murder of his wife and her loathsome lover, reads more like an extended metaphor of America’s loss of moral center after the Vietnam War. Boyd is a severely shell-shocked WWI vet whose grim experiences included the mercy killing of a critically wounded officer and the use of a corpse to shield himself from capture during the Battle of Argonne. Like the ’Nam vets who could not pick up the pieces of their prewar lives, Boyd has become a permanent outsider to all but a few who think they know him better than he knows himself. The central question here—how much can we really know our neighbors?—fades away as the authors bring on the usual elements of courtroom melodrama, with mostly stock characters reciting familiar lines. Exceptions are the defiant black prisoner Boyd befriends and the wounded, wonderfully compassionate Major Hennessey, administrator of the town’s Soldiers Home, whom Hackman must play if this is ever filmed.
Great small-town period detail with standard-issue courtroom scenes, a few too many stock characters, and an appropriately bitter twist ending.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32425-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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 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
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