Baker the social historian (he’s pretty good) trumps the novelist (not so hot) in this overstuffed novel whose parts are...
World War II Harlem is the setting for the parallel stories of a preacher (invented) and a hustler (the future Malcolm X) in Baker’s fourth novel, which concludes his New York–based trilogy.
A Harlem minister, Jonah Dove, is returning by train to New York from Martha’s Vineyard with his wife Amanda. Jonah, light enough to pass for white, and his much darker wife are saved from a mob of racist soldiers by an intrepid railroad sandwich man, 18-year-old Malcolm Little, leaving Jonah feeling impotent and humiliated. His famous father Milton (now 94) once led former slaves out of Virginia to form his first congregation. On retirement, he installed Jonah as his successor and even arranged his marriage; no surprise, then, that Jonah feels unworthy of his congregation and the too-perfect Amanda. Meanwhile, Malcolm, new to Harlem, is like a kid at Christmas, checking out the Savoy, Small’s Paradise and an anything-goes rent party. He falls in love with a beautiful white girl at the Savoy; he works as a waiter, a numbers runner, a drug dealer and a john-walker; he even has visions of Elijah Muhammad, though this reckless young blood has yet to touch bottom. Baker alternates between his two leads (goodbye, narrative momentum) while dipping frequently into their pasts. Scenes from Malcolm’s grim Michigan childhood are interwoven with striking vignettes of Elijah and Wallace Fard, his bizarre mentor; Jonah’s darkest hour occurred after rejection by his college buddies (they discovered he was colored). Affecting both men is a Harlem seething with anger at its army of occupation (the white cops) while black soldiers are being brutalized down South. Baker ends with an unlikely transformation. Wimpy Jonah, who has even botched his brief the-hell-with-it-all departure from home and church, returns to deliver a triumphant sermon, rescue Malcolm from a cop and defuse a race riot.
Baker the social historian (he’s pretty good) trumps the novelist (not so hot) in this overstuffed novel whose parts are better than the whole.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-019583-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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 best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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