Brave, accomplished and utterly compelling, seamed with passages of haunting, lyrical beauty.
Bell follows up his Haitian trilogy (The Stone that the Builder Refused, 2004, etc.) with a novel of the Confederacy.
Born in poverty, Nathan Bedford Forrest created his own fortune, earned a reputation for inborn military genius and rose to national fame. A self-made man from a hardscrabble background, Forrest was a particularly American figure, and monuments bearing his stony image still dot the American landscape. But he was also a slave trader, a Confederate general and a founding leader of the Ku Klux Klan—at first glance a most unlikely subject for Bell, best known for chronicling a slave-led revolution in three critically praised novels. But it turns out the author is eminently suited for producing an informed, nuanced and not unsympathetic portrait of a man mostly remembered today as a patron saint of white supremacists. Bell puts Forrest in context, re-creating a society in which the enslavement of blacks by whites is traditional and uncontroversial, an unquestioned part of the natural order. Echoing his past work, the author creates a counterpoint to his protagonist in Henri, a Haitian who travels to the United States to stir a slave rebellion but ends up fighting alongside Forrest. Henri brings a Creole perspective and a distinctly African spirituality to the narrative. Bell imagines Forrest’s interactions with Henri and the other black men who follow him, including one who is his son, as well as his relationships with household slaves and the black woman who becomes his longtime mistress. In doing so, he reveals the complexity and range of interracial interaction possible in the Old South. Some will argue that Forrest hardly deserves humanizing, and that argument has merit. But Bell has chosen to exercise one of the novelist’s greatest gifts: He makes an alien world real and, in so doing, reminds us that slavery was not a spontaneous, supernatural evil, but the product of a particular cultural environment.
Brave, accomplished and utterly compelling, seamed with passages of haunting, lyrical beauty.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-42488-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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