Sharp, snooping political satire.
The fictional, humorous life and times of Gordon Walter, Richard Nixon’s top-secret right-hand man.
During World War II, Walter met young Lt. Richard Nixon in the Navy. While stationed in the South Pacific, Walter proved his worth by helping Nixon make off with a few cases of an admiral’s whiskey for a party. From that moment on, whenever he needed a little covert help behind the scenes, Nixon turned to his old friend. As Nixon’s political career took off, he found himself calling on Walter’s services again and again, especially after he became president. Among other things, Walter secretly oversaw the Plumbers—“a group that we can pin the blame on if things go wrong, so people will have someone and won’t go digging for us”—babysat a deliciously inept Spiro Agnew, helped orchestrate the buildup to a manufactured (ultimately unnecessary) war with Albania and was there throughout the Watergate scandal, which, as Walter explains, was a huge mix-up from the start. As edited by Alaric Thistle, this debut fictional memoir is an uproarious take on the Nixon years as seen from the inside. There are ample laughs throughout the book, but some sections stand out, especially Walter and Agnew’s covert trip to England and Germany to bolster the vice president’s foreign policy–making skills and Walter’s experience tailing Nixon’s burglars while they attempt to nab Ellsberg’s psychiatric file from his doctor’s office. Walter and Nixon’s imagined plotting lends a humorous slant to real-life historical events, and Walter himself is a great character—wry, licentious but with a stubborn loyal streak. Similarly, Nixon’s voice is captured perfectly: Readers will all but hear his jowly baritone. While the tone is satirical, the high level of historical detail adds a layer of richness. Although bound to amuse even casual readers, those more familiar with the politics, personalities and scandals of the Nixon years are likely to especially appreciate this irreverent take on the era.
Sharp, snooping political satire.Pub Date: March 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1938985096
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Christopher Matthews Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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