For a reader who knows nothing at all about John Brown, this is a satisfactory but not altogether inspiring place to start.
A docudrama about the insurgent abolitionist John Brown (1800-1859).
With racial conflict once again occupying center stage in the national dialogue, the present day seems especially ripe for a fresh new biographical portrait of the anti-slavery agitator whose scorched-earth campaign in the late 1850s presaged and likely hastened the Civil War. Weaving historical record with his own imaginings of what Brown, his family, and others may have said 160 years ago, Karl, the author of a teen novel, The Toom County Mud Race (1992), chronicles Brown’s three-year war against slavery. He begins with the 1856 incident in which abolitionist Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner is beaten bloody in the Senate chamber by a South Carolina congressman, which serves as prelude to Brown’s battle that same year against pro-slavery forces trying to keep Kansas in their column. The book climaxes with the ill-fated 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, to initiate an armed slave uprising and concludes with Brown’s subsequent arrest, trial, and execution. Karl’s overall depiction of Brown is that of a ruminative, intensely religious family man whose conversation is all but overrun with references to the divine. (“Everything moves in sublime harmony in the government of God…Not so with us poor creatures.”) He is also shown to be remarkably composed in battle and quietly insistent in conversation with such eminences as his great ally Frederick Douglass, who warned him of trouble at Harpers Ferry. Such factors offer a needed corrective to past portraits of Brown tending to paint him as a wild-eyed and ruthless fanatic. The problem is that Karl bends so far backward toward straightforward characterization that he mutes, if not altogether loses, so much of what made Brown colorful and vivid. The result resembles nothing so much as a grown-up version of biographies written for teenagers in which fact and fiction uneasily coexist in a diorama of historical events where surfaces are easier to perceive than the substance behind them.
For a reader who knows nothing at all about John Brown, this is a satisfactory but not altogether inspiring place to start.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61373-633-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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