Ford brings an interesting, fictively personal outlook to one of the classics. Inspired and highly informed, The Ten...
Xenophon’s Anabasis provides the model for this epic first novel of Greek mercenaries stranded in the heart of the Persian empire during the late fifth century
When Xenophon composed the Anabasis he used the pseudonym Themistogenes of Syracuse, but here, Ford brings Themistogenes—Theo—to the foreground as narrator and protagonist. Xenophon’s lifelong companion, Theo is initially a slave, later a freedman, and now serving as aide-de-camp. It’s through Theo’s eyes that we see Xenophon’s growth from a rather delicate and pampered boy to the questioning young scholar who sits at the feet of Socrates, to the soldier of fortune. The main action takes place after Athens’ defeat by Sparta and the subsequent reign of the Thirty Tyrants. Xenophon is lured to the mercenary life, against his father’s wishes, by a cousin, Proxenus, who is in the command of Cyrus the Younger, half-brother to the Persian king Artaxerses and pretender to the Persian throne. When Cyrus is killed in battle, the entire Greek command, ten thousand strong, is left to fend for itself in hostile territory. Later, when the Greek commanders, including Proxenus, are treacherously murdered by the Persians, Xenophon leads them through Asia Minor and Armenia to the Black Sea. Having Theo narrate is a nice touch, as he can move freely through the army’s strata. His observations and comments are sharp, the way we have come to expect a person of his rank to behave in literature. With the exception of Socrates, he spares no one, and is pointedly critical of Thucydides, historian of the Peloponnesian War. The descriptive language throughout is heroic, at times echoing the Iliad.
Ford brings an interesting, fictively personal outlook to one of the classics. Inspired and highly informed, The Ten Thousand may lead many readers back to the original.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26946-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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