The story of the heroic stand of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto against the might of German arms and the depravity of German terrorism has been told unforgettably by John Hersey in The Wall (1950). What is etched forever on memory from that book is the extraordinary depth of psychological perception, as people emerge, larger than life- but with black, white and grey — good and evil- heroism and cowardice — self abnegation and self seeking all giving a note of authenticity that marks it as history rather than story... Uris has chosen, in making central to his story, the same unbelievable proof of man's capacity for suffering and ability to endure and fight and live, to tell it in a broader frame of reference, and to build, on factual details, a tremendous saga of adventure and heroism. Some of his characters, even within the ghetto, fail to meet the challenge; others temporize, excuse their cowardice on grounds of thinking of their families, but Uris never wholly penetrates the conflicts of forces within the people themselves. He simply states the case- develops the facts to prove it. But he has used all of his great gift of story telling to carry the great sweep from August-prior to German invasion of Poland- through the final escape of a mere handful of the freedom fighters from the holocaust that ended the month long defense of the Ghetto. He has tapped primary sources of notes kept at the time and held in the Ghetto Fighters House International Museum; he has interviewed individual survivors of the Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz in Israel and the Survivors' Association; he has had access to the archives in Jerusalem and elsewhere. And- as he did in Exodus — he has brought history alive in what is indubitably fictionized form, but with the breath of life in the telling.
Pub Date: June 16, 1961
ISBN: 0553241605
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1961
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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