Drinkard (Disobedience, 1993, etc.) has fashioned an imaginative, unique take on American history, charged with the...
Brooklyn novelist Drinkard’s latest offers a quirky look at the Revolutionary War from the vantage point of a hemp-growing New York farmer and his family, hampered by conflicting loyalties.
A fatal encounter early in the American Revolution between a British officer and Long Island hemp farmer Salt, his trigger-happy 17-year-old son, James, and their manumitted servant Drinky Crow, forces Salt to flee their home or be shot for the officer’s murder. The Brits garrison in Salt’s considerable homestead, run with an iron will by his capable, attractive wife, Molly, and her doddering Loyalist father, Ebenezer. The old man owns the place, and never liked Salt; in his old age, Ebenezer begins to mistake his daughter for his late wife. The commanding officer, Major General Michael Drayton, makes sexual advances toward Molly, who is not averse to succumbing to passion now that her rather ineffectual, cannabis-smoking husband is absent; in return, Drayton offers recalcitrant son James, secretly a reader of Paine’s Common Sense, a career as an officer. Meanwhile, Salt is pressed by pirates onto Bright Star, a vessel running contraband and directed by the tyrant Captain Marbury. Salt is given three years’ indentured service amid a motley crew of slaves, Arabs, Indians and Spaniards, and because he looks remarkably like the captain, is forced into the dangerous position of impersonating him when the crew is taken aboard the British prison ship Jersey, a development resulting in weeks of wretched conditions among the debased prisoners, scurrilous details—of buggering, nitpicking, random violence, torture—that Drinkard seems to delight in relaying; at home, James has become a British officer, and Molly is pregnant by Drayton.
Drinkard (Disobedience, 1993, etc.) has fashioned an imaginative, unique take on American history, charged with the subtleties of shifting and treacherous loyalties, and all wonderfully human.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101119-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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