A stimulating, fun play on revisionist history.
A slight change in the trajectory of a bullet causes Kennedy to survive–creating enormous historical ramifications.
This experimental political novel consists of entwined narratives, each compelling, which make readers complicit participants in their interplay. One is the draft of a definitive biography of John F. Kennedy by a female author named Trish, the other the perspective of the draft’s reader, his daughter Caroline, as she reminisces on the text at the behest of its author. Dialogue between these women mirrors the reader’s reactions, anticipating doubts and sparking reflection, which injects the novel with an uncanny self-awareness. The biography within the novel deviates from history, with Kennedy’s recuperation from the assassination attempt and subsequent mission to mend what he perceives as the destructive course of American and global politics. He converts a surge of public sympathy into political capital of unprecedented popularity. This arms him to take on conventional, ossified politics, interest groups, military aggression and energy dependence. He seeks to eradicate root causes in the great challenges facing him: the Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement. The president is also depicted interacting with several historical figures: Fidel Castro, Khrushchev, Lyndon B. Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., even the Beatles. Golden renders all with impressively credible dialogue and, in the case of political figures, oratory. The fictitious biography focuses on the relationship between Kennedy men Jack and Bobby, and their complex and troubled relationship with their father Joseph. Caroline’s reveries also provide insight into family dynamics, influenced by the strains of public life. This is a thought-provoking portrait of a family at the center of American power, acutely aware of its legacy for future generations. Although methodical, loosely following the template of history, this alternate world holds many surprises. Whether or not readers find Kennedy’s almost-superhuman statesmanship believable will correlate somewhat with their personal politics–oblique references to contemporary politics abound, however subtle. The book’s optimism, only slightly tempered by tragedy and realistic cynicism, will not appeal to all, but Golden’s skill at realistically transporting political rhetoric and historical personalities through the prism of imagination makes the book a compelling account of what the president might have become.
A stimulating, fun play on revisionist history.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-595-47192-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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