An inventively written collection of excerpts that may frustrate readers who are unfamiliar with the author.
An anthology of fiction thematically organized around American conflicts.
The history of the United States has always been tempestuous, rife with war and violent domestic struggle. In this book, Blue (Bird Tales, 2014, etc.) groups 55 chapters from his 12 novels into six sections, each devoted to a particular period in America’s past and with a special emphasis on the conflict that defined it. The collection begins with World War I and then takes the reader on a literary tour of the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, and the Cold War as well as the turmoil surrounding the civil rights movement, the ideological battle over the purpose of higher education, and the war on drugs. Blue often chooses unusual perspectives through which to examine each epoch; for example, in excerpts from Giessow’s Cottage Farm, 10-year-old Jaybird runs away from home repeatedly in the 1930s until he makes friends with an enigmatic man named Phil, who lost his father in the Great War. In chapters of Shorty Spooner, the titular protagonist is a half–Native American, half-white crew chief for a telephone company in 1956 who supervises a remarkably diverse team for the Alabama of the era. Blue can also be absurdly funny, capturing human foibles with satire. In extracts from Higher Ed, the 6-foot-9-inch president of Sidney University, Dr. Edward Appleton—nicknamed “Higher Ed”—learns that the school’s star fullback, House Finch, has been arrested for petty theft, and he’s subsequently beleaguered by requests that he look the other way ahead of a big game. The author’s prose is typically sharp, and his appraisals of the nation’s history gimlet-eyed. However, for anyone who’s unfamiliar with Blue’s corpus of work, this collection of excerpts will be difficult to understand without context. Even the sequence of chapter selections can be confusing: the book jumps from the third chapter of Count to Chapter 35 and back to Chapter 15. For those interested in Blue’s writing, the best plan would be to skip this book entirely and read any of his full novels instead.
An inventively written collection of excerpts that may frustrate readers who are unfamiliar with the author.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-2549-5
Page Count: 404
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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