Fans of W.P. Kinsella, sports history nuts and anyone drawn to prewar popular culture should sprint for this book. It’s a...
Mingling fictional characters with real-life notables of the age, King joyfully concocts a Depression-era tale of a secret baseball game between the best white baseball players and their black counterparts.
“Flush with $25,000 from his first kidnapping, John Henry Sealund headed east to Chicago.” This is how we meet the first of two laugh-out-loud funny knuckleheads (the other being one James Atwood) who bumble their way into a world of movie stars, gossip mavens and the greatest baseball players who ever lived. Negro League legend Satchel Paige wants money; Henry Ford wants to prove the white (and non-Jewish) race is superior; Shoeless Joe Jackson wants his long-denied shot at redemption; some kid from the Pacific League named DiMaggio wants to prove himself; Babe Ruth wants another hot dog; and all the players want a chance to square off against their doppelgängers, whom they’re prohibited from playing in the pre–Jackie Robinson era. As the organizers put their teams together and move toward game day, King spins glorious set pieces, including a Hollywood party attended by George Burns, Carole Lombard and gossip columnist Walter Winchell—who narrates the novel from the grave—at which a pie fight breaks out. King’s exuberant tone is pitch-perfect, and his dialogue is sharp: Standing on the pitcher’s mound, Dizzy Dean tells switch-hitter Cool Papa Bell, “Cool, the day you hit a homer off me will be a day that don’t end in a ‘y.’ ”) There’s also wonderful period detail, such as Paige’s catcher putting a beefsteak in his mitt to cushion Satch’s bone-breaking fastballs.
Fans of W.P. Kinsella, sports history nuts and anyone drawn to prewar popular culture should sprint for this book. It’s a bracing, bottom-of-the-ninth grand slam.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2005
ISBN: 0-525-94905-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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