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
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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