An accomplished writer, Neugeboren draws a nice sketch of an ebullient, affectionate Baer, but overall he leaves too many...
As the real-life prizefighter Baer rises to become heavyweight champion and a national celebrity, he shares himself and his good fortune with a black couple who guard an awful secret.
Neugeboren (The American Sun & Wind Moving Picture Company, 2013, etc.) starts this odd historical novel with a Foreword in which a fictional African-American biblical scholar introduces the book as a memoir dictated to his mother, Joleen Littlejohn, by his visually challenged uncle, Horace, whom he thought of as a father, before his death in 1999. The scholar also reveals that his biological father was Max Baer and that his mother, besides sleeping with the boxer, had sex for years with brother Horace, who was also a bedmate of Baer’s. It’s quite a setup that not only discloses almost all the book’s juicy stuff, but tries to give it a biblical blessing by citing the Song of Solomon’s praise of physical love. Neugeboren goes on to flesh out a narrative loosely hung on the real-life Baer’s boxing career. The siblings meet him in 1929 and sexual sparks fly. But don’t expect Fifteen Rounds of Grey here. The steamy action is offstage as the Littlejohns work for Baer, living on his ranch and off his triumphs and celebrity. Also don’t expect too much from the book’s title, which gives unwarranted freight to the boxer’s wearing a Star of David on his shorts for a 1933 bout with Hitler favorite Max Schmeling. The fictional Baer is more interested in publicity than in crusading. Last and worst, don’t expect much of a clue as to why the author of a quasi-historical novel would create a pair of incestuous black siblings and link them to the pugilist.
An accomplished writer, Neugeboren draws a nice sketch of an ebullient, affectionate Baer, but overall he leaves too many questions unanswered.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942134-17-6
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Mandel Vilar Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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