There is much good here but much to wade through.
This earnest historical novel traces an unusual nexus of influential German men behind social and political trends from the late 19th century to the early 1930s.
With his ugly title, scholar’s prose, homiletic dialogue, and dire clichés, Duberman (Hold Tight Gently, 2014, etc.), a professor of history emeritus at the City University of New York, heaps up impedimenta in the way of enjoying what are at bottom some fascinating wrinkles in the belle epoque and the years leading to Hitler’s emergence. It “isn’t quite” a historical novel, as Duberman concedes in an Author’s Note, but a “tapestry of interlocking personalities” in which he has let his period research point him “to presumptively ‘likely’ feelings and opinions” for his main characters. They are Count Harry Kessler, an active diarist and a wealthy player in contemporary art as patron and collector; Walter Rathenau, the head of the AEG industrial powerhouse and rare heterosexual in the narrative; and Magnus Hirschfeld, a leader in the growing field of sexology and in efforts to kill Germany’s Paragraph 175, which criminalizes sex between men. Duberman traces the predominantly gay coterie of noblemen surrounding Kaiser Wilhelm II. A “hard-hitting” muckraking newsman and nasty libel trials spark moral outrage that the German ruler shrugs off, while his bellicose shipbuilding competition with the British lights a fuse to WWI. Kessler seems to know every major artist and most writers in Europe. He collaborates with Hugo von Hofmannsthal on the libretto of Der Rosenkavalier. A Berlin salon brings him and Rathenau together, and their conversational fencing over politics and culture allows Duberman to pause his heavy chronicle for perfectly theme-serving chats. For a time there is more tolerance of gays than of Jews in Germany, although Rathenau manages to rise high because of his industrial clout and diplomatic skills. As the brown shirts hit the fan, even ham-fisted clichés—“the elephant is now decidedly in the room”—can’t distract from the horror of the rising violence against queers and Jews and other Germans. Duberman distills it nicely in the assassination of Rathenau and the huge funeral that followed, leading for a brief time to a Germany that might not end up embracing Adolf.
There is much good here but much to wade through.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60980-738-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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