A well-written, action-packed climax to an excellent work of historical fiction.
In the third installment of this multigenerational family saga, World War I brings changes for the Winship family as James Winship returns to his roots to champion Irish home rule.
After a fairly pointless preface, in which Winston and Randolph Churchill discuss James’ death on the eve of World War II, McCarthy relates, with his usual page-turning élan, the events leading up to that point. Star-crossed lovers Cornelia and Brendan finally get back together, but life continues to conspire against them; meanwhile, Brendan’s brother William and his wife Anne have a child. Both Brendan and William eventually find themselves in the trenches of World War I, and James quits the Liberal Party for the Irish Party over the stalled home rule legislation. The Sudburys again harass the Winships; they nearly destroy James’ political career by paying a prostitute to frame him and later make an attempt on other family members’ lives. As usual, McCarthy’s effortless combination of real and imagined characters will send readers to the history books to sort out who’s who; this time, he adds Irish Republican leaders Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins to the mix. And, as always, he rewards readers with vivid, visceral action scenes, including assassination attempts, harrowing escapes and trench warfare: “Men were falling back down the trench, cut to pieces, dead or badly maimed. [Brendan]could feel his heart racing and, for a moment, thought he was going to faint. Then he heard Smith shouting over the din, ‘Let’s go, sir. We’re up.’ ” This final installment is a satisfying wrap-up of the saga, filled with engaging, empathetic and realistic characters. In a smooth, logical progression, it bounces easily from one character’s tale to the next—and from one momentous world event to another.
A well-written, action-packed climax to an excellent work of historical fiction.Pub Date: April 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494732158
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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