The adulterer is JFK, and Mercurio (Ascent, 2007, etc.) proceeds from the premise that the president’s philandering was not private and recreational, but central to both his character and his governance.
The narrative takes readers through Kennedy’s tragically truncated term, from the rousing inaugural speech to the Bay of Pigs, the European summits, the Missile Crisis and on at last to Dallas. It also—with gusto—lingers over the sordid but no less well-known tales of his assignations with Marilyn and Judy, adding a presumably fictional “pair of White House concubines” code-named Fiddle and Faddle by the Secret Service. In the popular press JFK is often treated as an unaccountable hybrid of visionary statesman and satyr, but Mercurio insists from the beginning that these two sides are entwined rather than contradictory. He reunites the bodily Kennedy—frail, pain-wracked, shot up with an array of drugs prescribed by competing doctors, insistent that without frequent sex his poisons will back up and his head will throb—with the daring and eloquent idealist. The novel reads like a psychological case study, a conceit emphasized by JFK being referred to throughout as “the subject.” Mercurio ingeniously reads the Profumo Affair, a notorious 1963 British sex scandal, as a turning point after which the press, until then accustomed to hushing up politicians’ sexual misconduct, decided that such matters were not after all private and began to divulge them.
Stylish, intelligent, often persuasive revisionist history, though perhaps too insistent on its premise: It’s sometimes hard to tell whether the obsession with sex is JFK’s or the author’s.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-1563-3
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
Categories: GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
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 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Categories: RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
While a few weeks ago it seemed as if Praeger would have a two month lead over Dutton in their presentation of this Soviet best seller, both the "authorized" edition (Dutton's) and the "unauthorized" (Praeger's) will appear almost simultaneously. There has been considerable advance attention on what appears to be as much of a publishing cause celebre here as the original appearance of the book in Russia. Without entering into the scrimmage, or dismissing it as a plague on both your houses, we will limit ourselves to a few facts. Royalties from the "unauthorized" edition will go to the International Rescue Committee; Dutton with their contracted edition is adhering to copyright conventions. The Praeger edition has two translators and one of them is the translator of Doctor Zhivago Dutton's translator, Ralph Parker, has been stigmatized by Praeger as "an apologist for the Soviet regime". To the untutored eye, the Dutton translation seems a little more literary, the Praeger perhaps closer to the rather primitive style of the original. The book itself is an account of one day in the three thousand six hundred and fifty three days of the sentence to be served by a carpenter, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. (Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner.) From the unrelenting cold without, to the conditions within, from the bathhouse to the latrine to the cells where survival for more than two weeks is impossible, this records the hopeless facts of existence as faced by thousands who went on "living like this, with your eyes on the ground". The Dutton edition has an excellent introduction providing an orientation on the political background to its appearance in Russia by Marvin Kalb. All involved in its publication (translators, introducers, etc.) claim for it great "artistic" values which we cannot share, although there is no question of its importance as a political and human document and as significant and tangible evidence of the de-Stalinization program.
Pub Date: June 15, 1963
ISBN: 0451228146
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1963
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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