An enjoyable change-up from The Bartender’s Tale (2012) and welcome evidence that Doig, in his 70s, is more prolific and...
Morrie Morgan returns (Work Song, 2010, etc.) to again confront the evil Anaconda Copper Mining Company, as well as several unwelcome reminders of his checkered past.
Just back in Butte after a yearlong honeymoon with Grace, who’s temporarily given up her boardinghouse but not her suspicions that her irrepressible spouse isn’t much of a provider, Morrie needs to find a job fast. Not only has he nearly run through his winnings from a savvy bet on the fixed 1919 World Series, but he has an expensive mansion to maintain; wealthy cattleman-turned-librarian Sam Sandison hands over his home in an upper-crust neighborhood sardonically known as Horse Thief Row with the proviso that Morrie has to pay for its upkeep. So Morrie goes to work as the editorial writer for a new newspaper funded by the miners’ union to counter Anaconda’s propaganda for unfettered capitalism. Many, many complications ensue—this is Doig’s most elaborately (and occasionally improbably) plotted novel—but they are less interesting than the marvelously atmospheric portrait of the bygone newspaper trade and an engaging cast of characters sketched with the author’s customary vigor. Among the familiar figures are careworn union leader Jared Evans, devising strategy from his new post as state senator; and the semireformed street kid known as Russian Famine who leads Morrie to a gut-clenching climax high atop the mineshafts’ towering headframes. Unscrupulous but gifted columnist Cedric “Cutthroat” Cartwright, recruited from Chicago by Anaconda to bandy editorials with Morrie, makes a colorful addition who gets a highly satisfying comeuppance. It’s mostly a lighthearted romp, right down to the striking likeness to Montana’s “number one bootlegger” that enables Morrie finally to make sure the Chicago mob won’t dare come after him. Yet Doig also quietly conveys the injustices and cruelties of American history, particularly in the realistically depressing and temporary resolution of the union’s struggle with Anaconda.
An enjoyable change-up from The Bartender’s Tale (2012) and welcome evidence that Doig, in his 70s, is more prolific and entertaining than ever.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59448-734-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
PROFILES
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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