A sobering tale of women abused by a man and a faith that demanded total obedience. Still, lacking Lee’s own testimony, the...
A subtle and powerful, if incomplete, indictment of a man and a sect as three wives recall their husband, the Mormon leader executed for his role in the notorious 1857 Mountain Meadow Massacre, where emigrants from Arkansas were murdered by Mormons and their Native American allies.
At times, the numerous evocations of the scenery of the Southwest cloy, but the landscape, austerely beautiful and often merciless, also shapes responses and encourages a toughness of mind and heart, as well as an abiding faith. Beginning in 1877, when the charismatic John Doyle Lee is executed by a firing squad at the site of the massacre, the wives each begin offering up their different takes on Lee. English-born Emma, waiting at a ferry on the Colorado for news of his execution, recalls how she came to Utah and met Lee. Smitten, she readily agreed to marriage, but, as one of his 19 wives, found life in his settlement in southern Utah more difficult than she had expected. Her faith soured when she saw the clothing of the massacred parceled out among the Mormon families and observed the traumatized children who had survived the shootings. Wife Ann, a free spirit, recalls her hard life after she decided to leave Lee and her children to travel, often disguised as a man. She believes him guilty, for as a child she saw him kill an innocent man. Third wife Rachel proudly recalls how she became one of Lee’s earliest conquests and how she accompanied him to prison, believing him innocent. As Emma, still in love with Lee, grieves, she begins to make a new life; Ann continues her wanderings; and Rachel struggles to feed her family in a desert outpost.
A sobering tale of women abused by a man and a faith that demanded total obedience. Still, lacking Lee’s own testimony, the ghastly event is only partially explained. Freeman (A Desert of Pure Feeling, 1996, etc.), a former Mormon herself, has done better.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-42092-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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