by Julian Stockwin ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2001
Likable Tom and his shipmates make a snug fit in that page-turning Forester & O’Brian tradition—thanks to retired Royal...
Brisk action on the high seas as Thomas Kydd (Kydd, 2001) makes the second of what bids fair to be a series of profitable voyages.
It’s 1793, and Napoleon is having much the better of it than the British army, but watch out. Here’s the British navy on the briny brink of becoming mighty. Doing his share—and loving it—is that erstwhile perruquier Thomas Kydd, who, six months earlier could never have imagined that life as a tar would suit him so. Six months earlier, in fact, he’d been forced out of wig-making and into the service, Kyddnapped, as it were, by a scavenging press-gang. But Tom, it turned out, was the stuff of naturals, and a lucky sailor, too, since in his new berth aboard the fleet frigate Artemis he gets a chance to share in the glory of a stirring victory at sea. It’s a pivotal one, achieved at the expense of the Citoyenne, a French frigate even larger than the Artemis. “Now we’ve proved they can be stopped,” exults Admiral Sir John Clowes when the stunning news reaches Portsmouth, where a few hours later Tom learns how it feels to be lionized. But roller-coasters go down as well as up. In Tom’s absence, the family business has not flourished, he’s informed by sister Cecilia. Either he returns to the wiggery, or the Kydds face desperate straits. No real choice, and so back to landlocked Guildhall goes dutiful, bitterly disappointed Tom. At this point enter Nicholas Rienzi, Tom’s closest friend, with the plan that makes possible a surprising new life for the Kydds while freeing Tom for a return to the sea and ports of call as far off as India and China. There await perils and trials galore, but the friends survive, and no right-thinking reader would have it otherwise.
Likable Tom and his shipmates make a snug fit in that page-turning Forester & O’Brian tradition—thanks to retired Royal Navy author Stockwin.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1460-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
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 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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