The concluding work in Coyle's splendid two-volume series on America's Civil War. Look Away (1995) followed the star-crossed Bannon brothers, James (a gentleman ranker in Virginia's Stonewall Brigade) and Kevin (a captain with the 4th New Jersey Volunteer Infantry), from their troubled but privileged youth in the Garden State through a brief face-to-face encounter at Gettysburg. The narrative at hand (which provides background enough to stand alone) picks up the parallel stories of James and Kevin after Gettysburg and tracks them through the endgame of a horrific conflict that proves more an endurance contest than a noble cause. Although James and Kevin never meet again on a battlefield, they are unwitting antagonists in many of the Eastern Theater's bloodiest campaigns. Among other near-miss collisions, James marches with the ragtag forces assembled by Jubal Early to menace Washington in mid-1864, while Kevin, still weak from wounds, commands a motley company of convalescents and Army clerks hastily armed to defend the seat of federal government. In their few respites from close-quarters combat, the brothers take comfort in two fine women, Kevin with Harriet Shields (a headstrong lass who, against her family's wishes, has gone south to nurse Union casualties) and James with Mary Beth McPherson (sister of a slain comrade). The fortunes of war throw Harriet and Mary Beth together when the latter's homestead is requisitioned as a front-line aid station in the wake of a Yankee rout of rebel troops near Winchester, Va. They soon part, and hostilities grind on until the North captures the Confederate capital of Richmond, where Mary Beth has gone to work in a munitions factory. Shortly thereafter, James (hopeful that the nation's suffering can now lead to national reconciliation) lays down his arms at Appomattox and heads North with Mary Beth, whom he's married, for a bittersweet reunion with Kevin and Harriet. A haunting, human-scale account of a cruel war.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81140-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
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
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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