A historically astute but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to braid too many stories into a unified whole.
In Newman’s (Getting Rich Doing What You Love, 2005) historical novel, an art curator receives a letter from Germany that shines a light on the cloudy circumstances of his birth.
In 1988, Daniel Singer, an expert on European Renaissance art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, receives a mysterious letter from Germany. It looks like official correspondence, although it’s hard to be certain as it’s written in German—a language that Daniel doesn’t speak. He wonders, however, if the letter contains key information about his past; his parents, Samuel and Agatha, told him long ago that he was adopted; his biological father, they said, was an American soldier that died serving in World War II, and his mother died soon after childbirth. However, although Daniel had seen his adoption certificate, he was never able to locate any documents that verified the details of his birth. From this setup, Newman constructs an impressively imaginative but convoluted tale that revolves around the enigmatic character of Daniel’s genesis. It involves a series of historically divergent tales; for example, the book chronicles the life of Jewish lawyer Arnold Weisz, who’s forced out of his profession when the Nazis take power and compelled to hide his family in Berlin. It also tells the tale of Bruno Schmidt, an ambitious German lawyer who rises to a position of great authority in the SS. Adding to an already overly packed plot, Newman details Samuel’s service as a military surgeon in World War II and the Arab-Israeli War in 1948 as well as Daniel's later service with the Mossad. The historical authenticity of the work is admirable; the author’s research is scrupulously rigorous, and much of the book is enjoyably edifying, as it offers a peek into several tumultuous conflicts in the 20th century. But overall, the story feels muddled and finally implausible, and the author’s prose style is rather wooden; for instance, upon receiving the peculiar letter, Daniel wonders to himself: “What could all this be about? I can’t help but think that there might be something important here.”
A historically astute but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to braid too many stories into a unified whole.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5255-4883-3
Page Count: 377
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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