A standard cast-of-characters tale, formulaic but decently done.
First fiction from a bestselling Middle East historian: a story, based in part on his father’s WWII reminiscences, of an army reunion commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge.
Oren (Six Days of War, 2002, etc.) takes us along with the remnants of the 133rd Infantry Battalion, who meet up in the tiny Belgian village of St.-Vith to catch up on what they’ve been doing since the Ardennes offensive of 1944. Like most army units, the 133rd is a mixed bag. There’s Colonel Rifesnider, a blueblood preppie who served as headmaster at several tony prep schools after the war until his fondness for young boys became too blatant. Major Walker, who ran most of the daily operations of the unit, was a wild Texas rancher who became an even wilder Texas oilman after he inherited his Daddy’s spread and struck it rich in the 1950s. Lieutenant Hill was a no-nonsense officer who settled quietly into life as a bank manager in Iowa, while Corporal Perlmutter, the company clerk, went on to become a respected historian. Most have put the war far behind them, but for some it is the wound that never heals. Francis Spagnola, racked with guilt over his cowardice under fire, still attends weekly sessions of a veterans support group, while the stolid Wisconsin stonecutter Pieter Martinson continues to dream of the girl he forsook 50 years ago out of shame over his battle-fatigue discharge. More than a few ghosts are put to rest by story’s end—and several new skeletons exhumed from their closets. What kind of scheme, for example, was Rifesnider running with Perlmutter when the two stayed on after the hostilities to locate the corpses of American MIAs—corpses that were never officially found, though people claimed to have seen them? And what exactly has the town butcher (who served as a local errand boy for Rifesnider) got hidden in his cellar?
A standard cast-of-characters tale, formulaic but decently done.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-931561-26-5
Page Count: 356
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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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