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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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