A ferocious portrait of the Civil War’s human toll. Dann (The Memory Cathedral, 1995, etc.) isn’t much concerned here with causes or outcomes. His gruesome chronicle of the suffering of 14-year-old Edmund McDowell, caught up in the efforts of —Stonewall— Jackson to defeat a Federal Army in 1862, is clearly intended to remind us that the Civil War was as brutal as any other war. Mundy disobeys his minister father and goes in search of a skirmish, hoping to watch his hero Stonewall chase the Yankees out of his valley. Instead he stumbles into the midst of a rout, finds the body of a longtime acquaintance who had been searching for him, and arrives home in time to see Union deserters shoot his father and rape and murder his mother. Sick and disoriented, Mundy wanders in and out of the battle lines. Made a prisoner, he’s compelled for a time to work in a Union field hospital, witnessing almost unimaginable horrors. Escaping, he falls in briefly with a band of renegade slaves, and after leaving them becomes the companion of a deranged Confederate cavalryman. Despite Mundy’s efforts to escape both his memories and the ever-widening war zone, he inevitably finds himself back in the middle of the slaughter. There is no doubt that Dann captures, in a way few other novelists have, the sheer bloody chaos of battle in the Civil War. Scenes of carnage and madness—with Mundy ravaged by fever, prone to hallucinations, or convulsed by grief—linger in the mind. But the conceit of writing the book as Mundy’s memoirs doesn’t work; it isn’t likely that any 19th-century teenager would have said all the things Mundy does here. And the narrative is finally too long, too repetitive, as if the author didn—t trust the reader to grasp how awful war is. Still, Dann’s anger, and his portrait of combat’s sheer horrors, make for a vivid—and disturbing—read.
Pub Date: July 13, 1998
ISBN: 0-553-09716-4
Page Count: 301
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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
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
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