A gritty, psychologically acute saga of the Forgotten War.
American soldiers battle besieging communist hordes–and their demons–in this dark Korean War story.
George Company is the kind of stalwart, unglamorous infantry unit that bore the brunt of Korea’s bloody trench fighting circa 1952. It has a steady commander in Capt. Horace Crayley, a roster of oddball old-timers and a raft of greenhorn replacements who need breaking in. It’s a small, cloistered, intensely close-knit society, and West, a Korean War vet, paints an engrossing portrait of its mores, of the squalid atmospherics of war, including the sordid sex trade carried on across an army camp’s barbed wire perimeter, and of the subtle ways in which soldiers assess the character of the comrades and leaders on whom their lives depend. Into this pressure cooker drops Lt. Ed Clare, a gung-ho officer intent on winning glory for himself no matter the cost in his men’s lives. He’s a symbol of a war that, in West’s grim telling, has lost its rationale as it slouches toward stalemate. Battles are fought to win a few more miles of territory before the armistice talks begin, to advance a general’s career or, in the infantryman’s case, simply to stay alive. All three factors combine in George Company’s next assignment–to hold a strategic outcropping called Monastery Ridge against massive Chinese attacks. When battle comes, West crafts gripping, well-observed battle scenes, contrasting the desperation and chaos of real combat with the tidy heroics of official reports, probing the fraught instant when soldiers’ paralyzing fear gives way to wild exhilaration as they discover what their weapons can do to the enemy. They can do some pretty grisly things–“He pumped a round in, fired and saw one head disappear in a splendid pulpy mush”–and one pities the Chinese as they are slaughtered in heaps by American machine guns, explosives and napalm.
A gritty, psychologically acute saga of the Forgotten War.Pub Date: June 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-595-46211-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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