Solid fun: a good, old-fashioned adventure tale with plenty of action and no narrative frills.
Continuing his fictional stroll through classical history, Ford (Gods and Legions, 2002, etc.) provides a swashbuckling account of the exploits of Mithradates the Great, King of Pontus and scourge of ancient Rome.
Although he never quite became a household name like Alexander the Great, Mithradates (115–63 b.c.) deserves to be remembered in the company of that noble Greek, who set the pattern for every conqueror-statesman from Xerxes to Napoleon. A Persian, Mithradates grew up in the thoroughly Hellenized court of Pontus on the Black Sea, where the veneer of Greek civilization masked the brutality of Asiatic despotism. Under the rule of his weak mother, Queen Laodice, Pontus had become a vassal state of Rome, militarily impotent and economically subservient. The young Mithradates, not content in his role as heir apparent to a puppet throne, fled the palace and lived for seven years in the wilds of Pontus and Cappadocia, eventually returning at the head of an outlaw army to occupy the capital and depose his mother. As if that weren’t enough strife for one family, he then proceeded to marry his younger sister, who despised him but bore him one son before he killed her for plotting against his life. He then marauded through Cappadocia and Bythinia, gradually extending the sway of his rule until he became a threat to Rome itself. Over the course of some 20 years (88-66 b.c.), Mithradates was Public Enemy Number One as far as the Senate was concerned, and he proved astonishingly capable of rebounding from defeats at the hands of superior forces to recoup his losses with a vengeance, eventually conquering the whole of Asia Minor. Even after he met his match in the Roman general Pompey, Mithradates was able to get the last word in: He asked one of his own men to kill him, thus evading capture and execution.
Solid fun: a good, old-fashioned adventure tale with plenty of action and no narrative frills.Pub Date: March 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-27539-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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