A well-researched study of state-sanctioned bigotry.
A portrait of anti–Native American racism in education and on the battlefield.
The latest historical novel by author-director Sayles takes its title from a statement by Richard Henry Pratt, an Army captain who in 1879 founded the Carlisle School to force Native Americans to assimilate: “To save the man, we must kill the Indian!” Set across four months in 1890, the novel closely follows Pratt, Carlisle teachers, and about a half-dozen students forced to attend. Among them are Antoine, a half-Ojibwe boy who’s compelled to memorize Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha”; Trouble, a Sioux whose desperation moves him to attempt an escape; and Asa, a Papago assigned to sweatshop labor making shoes. Such degradations, from Pratt’s perspective, were progressive compared to the forces calling for the extermination of Native Americans. But his sanctimony blinds him to the Natives’ despair. The crisis at Carlisle is timed around the December massacre at Wounded Knee, which occurred after a U.S. soldier killed the Lakota chief Sitting Bull; one of Pratt’s lieutenants arrives to witness the fighting. Sayles, who has no Native background, is careful not to reduce his characters to types or be melodramatically damning of the Carlisle. But it’s clear that the idea of compelling various tribes—each with their own languages and folkways—to convert to white folkways was cruel, both emotionally and physically. (Students are detained, attempt suicide, and die for lack of immunity from diseases.) The Wounded Knee sections are imperfectly woven around the Carlisle sections, as if the book were separate novels. But in both plotlines, a racist urge to harm obtains. Pratt proclaims: “Our mission at the Carlisle School is to baptize the Indian youth in the waters of civilization—and to hold him under until he is thoroughly soaked!” (Or drowned.)
A well-researched study of state-sanctioned bigotry.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781685891411
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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