Inhuman agony, brilliantly portrayed.
Epic, tragic sequel to Dances With Wolves (1989, not reviewed).
It has been ten years since soldier John Dunbar joined the Comanches, took the name Dances With Wolves, and married Stands With A Fist, a white woman raised as a Comanche. Now the couple has a son, Snake In Hands, and two girls, Always Walking and Stays Quiet. They live in a lodge slightly outside the main village of Ten Bears, in which various symbols disturb the tribe’s sleep. A medal given by the Great White Chief in Washington to medicine man Kicking Bird, who wears it daily, and the long red hair of a white woman’s heavy scalp, which hangs in the lodge of great chief Wind in His Hair, are ever-present reminders of the white men closing in on the Plains from every direction—north, south, east, and west. A sense of overhanging tragedy afflicts the entire tribe, including Dances With Wolves and especially anxiety-ridden Stands With A Fist, who deeply fears being taken back into white society with her white Comanche children. The Cheyenne and a Quaker agent warn them that the whites plan to build a cross-country railroad straight through the land. The Comanche join forces with the Kiowa for their own protection, and Dances With Wolves becomes a member of the Hard Shields, a small body of warriors pledged to fight to the last breath. But for every white soldier they kill, two replace him. After white rangers destroy Ten Bears, slaughter half its people, and kidnap Stands With A Fist and Stays Quiet, Dances With Wolves seeks his lost ones among the whites, hearing English for the first time in 11 years. Kicking Bird, intent on working out some kind of coexistence with the invaders, again goes to the Great White Chief in wondrous Washington, but this will lead only to the final downfall of the tribes.
Inhuman agony, brilliantly portrayed.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-44866-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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