by Ivan Goldman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2012
Ultimately disappointing, but a brief, quick-moving novel that has, especially early, its share of pungencies and pleasures.
Goldman’s latest, following The Barfighter (2009), centers on an unlikely love story.
Ruth is a beauty with a murky past—at 2, she was abandoned by her parents, and has never discovered the circumstances—who’s scratching out a living as an itinerant adjunct instructor of English, roving the freeways of southern California to teach overprivileged but underethical freshmen. Lenny is…well, Lenny is the biblical Isaac, nearly sacrificed by his father, Abraham. He's been granted an eternal youth he is at pains to understand, for purposes he cannot divine, by forces he cannot identify. This state of affairs is, inevitably, as much curse as blessing, and he has no choice but to drift through the millennia, changing address and identity frequently and toiling at inconspicuous jobs like his current one in celebrity security. He and Ruth meet at an L.A. coffee shop in the embarrassing aftermath of a doomed first date Ruth arranged on the Internet. Lenny is troubled by his relatively frequent encounters of late with the strange, cruel specter he calls The Beast, who’s locked horns with him often across 40 centuries, and he knows he’ll soon need to move on again; this undermines the romance, and he retreats a little. Meanwhile Ruth is offered, suddenly and mysteriously—here the book jumps the rails—a job in a high-powered think tank at Columbia University. Tenure soon follows, and international fame (People! Oprah!) for a book on Mary Shelley. And then Lenny realizes that the Adonislike ex-lover who offered her the job, a scholar-celebrity named Borges, is his old nemesis The Beast. The book is most comfortable in contemporary California, and in the witty, sharp realistic mode in which Goldman has excelled previously. But when it moves either back in history or forward to New York—to grand sacrificial romance, to theological thriller—the novel falters, hews too closely to formula, and doesn’t do enough with its promising premise.
Ultimately disappointing, but a brief, quick-moving novel that has, especially early, its share of pungencies and pleasures.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-57962-229-9
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
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by C.S. Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1942
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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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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