A compelling read on many levels, offering personal reflection, historical speculation and mystery.
A novel set on the eve of World War II, focusing on Dr. Eduard Bloch, an Austrian physician who treated Adolf Hitler as a young man and who had been the attending physician when Hitler’s mother was dying of breast cancer.
Neugeboren (Big Man, 2001, etc.) uses Bloch, an actual historical figure for whom Hitler had personally made arrangements to emigrate to the United States, to explore themes of racial purity, mysterious disappearance and psychological disturbance. Bloch’s life becomes entangled with that of Elisabeth Rofman, a medical illustrator who travels from Baltimore to New York City in search of her father, who has recently disappeared from his apartment in the Bronx. Elisabeth’s anxieties increase when she discovers that her mentally disturbed son Daniel has escaped from an institution in Baltimore. Complicating the action are the ministrations of Elisabeth’s former husband, a smooth and manipulative operator (pun intended—he’s a surgeon) who also wants to find Daniel, primarily to have him returned to the institution to undergo medical castration in an attempt to rein in his primal urges. Neugeboren mixes a third-person account of Elisabeth’s search for her husband and son (and antipathy for her ex-husband) with accounts from Bloch’s journal, in which he traces his growing romantic interest in Elisabeth and offers memories of the young Hitler and speculation on his rise to power. Bloch also dispassionately reviews his life and his status as an Edeljude, a “noble Jew,” who raises an interesting and ultimately unanswerable question: “In accepting favors granted to me by Adolf Hitler that were, to my knowledge, granted to no other Jew, have I been dishonorable?” While Bloch is too serene to be described as tormented by this question, it casts a shadow over his actions in 1940—both the year and the novel.
A compelling read on many levels, offering personal reflection, historical speculation and mystery.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9763895-6-9
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An impressive addition to the library of historical fiction on the Civil War, worthy of a place alongside The Killer Angels,...
A thunderous, action-rich first novel of the Civil War, based on historical fact.
Music publisher Hicks treats a long-overlooked episode of the war in this account of the Battle of Franklin, Tenn., which took place in November 1864 near Nashville. As a field hospital is pitched in her field, Carrie McGavock, an iron-spined farm woman and upstanding citizen of the town, takes it upon herself to tend after the Confederate wounded; later, she and her husband will rebury 1,500 of the fallen on their property. Hicks centers much of the story on Carrie, who has seen her own children die of illness and who has endurance in her blood. “I was not a morbid woman,” Carrie allows, “but if death wanted to confront me, well, I would not turn my head. Say what you have to say to me, or leave me alone.” Other figures speak their turn. One is a young Union officer amazed at the brutal and sometimes weird tableaux that unfold before him; as the bullets fly, he pauses before a 12-year-old rebel boy suffocating under the weight of his piled-up dead comrades. “Suffocated. I had never considered the possibility,” young Lt. Stiles sighs. Another is an Arkansas soldier taken prisoner by the Yankees: “I became a prisoner and accepted all the duties of a prisoner just as easily as I’d picked up the damned colors and walked forward to the bulwarks.” Yet another is Nathan Forrest, who would strike fear in many a heart as a Confederate cavalryman, and later as the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Hicks renders each of these figures with much attention to historical detail and a refreshing lack of genre cliché, closing with a subtle lament for the destruction of history before the bulldozer: “One longs to know that some things don’t change, that some of us will not be forgotten, that our perambulations upon the earth are not without point or destination.”
An impressive addition to the library of historical fiction on the Civil War, worthy of a place alongside The Killer Angels, Rifles for Watie and Shiloh.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-50012-7
Page Count: 404
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ambitious look at how women’s roles have changed—and stayed the same—over the last 70 years.
A sprawling story about two sisters growing up, apart, and back together.
Jo and Bethie Kaufman may be sisters, but they don’t have much else in common. As young girls in the 1950s, Jo is a tomboy who’s uninterested in clothes while Bethie is the “pretty one” who loves to dress up. When their father dies unexpectedly, the Kaufman daughters and their mother, Sarah, suddenly have to learn how to take care of themselves at a time when women have few options. Jo, who realizes early on that she’s attracted to girls, knows that it will be difficult for her to ever truly be herself in a world that doesn’t understand her. Meanwhile, Bethie struggles with her appearance, using food to handle her difficult emotions. The names Jo and Beth aren’t all that Weiner (Hungry Heart, 2016, etc.) borrows from Little Women; she also uses a similar episodic structure to showcase important moments of the sisters’ lives as she follows them from girlhood to old age. They experience the civil rights movement, protests, sexual assault, drugs, sex, and marriage, all while dealing with their own personal demons. Although men are present in both women's lives, female relationships take center stage. Jo and Bethie are defined not by their relationships with husbands or boyfriends, but by their complex and challenging relationships with their mother, daughters, friends, lovers, and, ultimately, each other. Weiner resists giving either sister an easy, tidy ending; their sorrows are the kind that many women, especially those of their generation, have had to face. The story ends as Hillary Clinton runs for president, a poignant reminder of both the strides women have made since the 1950s and the barriers that still hold them back.
An ambitious look at how women’s roles have changed—and stayed the same—over the last 70 years.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3348-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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