From Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima with Herman Wouk and the Henry family: an even longer book than The Winds of War (1971), with even greater emphasis on "scrupulous accuracy of locale and historical fact" at the expense of emotional involvement. Again Wouk's inbred cast of characters is programmed to be at all the right places and represent all the big issues. Capt. "Pug" Henry is Admiral Halsey's favorite commander—a vital presence at the battles of Midway, Guadalcanal, and Leyte Gulf, with time out to be FDR's Lend-Lease emissary in Moscow and then sit in on the Teheran conference. Pug's wife back home has a lover who's working on the A-bomb. Son Warren is a dive-bomber pilot killed at Midway. And son Byron is a submarine diving officer whose Jewish wife Natalie is stuck in Italy with her author uncle; they will almost escape many times before being brutalized by Eichmann in concentration camps, thus rediscovering their Jewishness. Meanwhile, Natalie's old Polish cousin Berel is escaping from Auschwitz with filmed evidence of atrocities, and Natalie's old flame, diplomat Leslie Slote, is trying to convince the complacent Allies that there really is a holocaust going on in Europe. Very familiar materials, arranged far too neatly; but Wouk is a gifted enough storyteller and dialogue-writer to make each personal sequence—from sub warfare to concentration-camp horrors—flicker with momentary vitality. Unfortunately, however, these sequences are separated by pages and pages of debate ("on the whole, the analogy between Auschwitz and Oak Ridge seems forced") and barely digested history, mostly military (from both German and Allied points of view). As a result, the human stories lose whatever small momentum they begin with: you can see every plot development coming at least 50 pages down the pike. Wouk's seriousness must be admired, but even War and Peace puts people first, ideas second, history third. Here it's the reverse order, premised on the notion that a wholesale retelling—without the focused intensity of a James Jones or an Elie Wiesel-is enough: "they will not have died in vain, if the remembrance can lead us from the long, long time of war to the time for peace." Enlivened only occasionally by Wouk's story-telling talents, such nobly intentioned bombast is likely to be—to an even greater degree than The Winds of War-much-bought and little-read.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1978
ISBN: 0316954993
Page Count: 1056
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1978
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
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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