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THE PRICE FOR GLORY

Name: THE PRICE FOR GLORY
Author: M.N. Snitz
ISBN: 978-1-5333-4164-8

by M.N. Snitz ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 18, 2016

An expansive novel that explores the lasting effects of war on successive generations.

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In Snitz’s debut historical novel, a Holocaust survivor prospers in the United States and plays a role in global events.

Abraham Steinnermann has a strong sense of Destiny (the word is always capitalized here), and as a boy growing up in interwar Germany, he envisions himself following in the footsteps of the Teutonic warlord Arminius. He excels as one of the very few Jewish students at Heidelberg University, and his banking skills keep him safe until 1942, when he is arrested and sent to Auschwitz. He survives, falls in love with Merriam, an aid worker, and makes his way to the United States, where he once again succeeds in banking and plays a crucial role in the postwar redevelopment of Europe. Merriam joins him, and they have one son, Jack, who follows in his father’s successful footsteps. Jack, a Marine, is scarred by his service in the Vietnam War, but he returns to civilian life and a career in finance and avoids dealing with his war experiences and resulting alcoholism until his girlfriend, Kathleen, demands it. As Jack is getting his emotions under control, Abe, on the verge of retirement, is persuaded to lead an international development project in Vietnam, where he ends up kidnapped and tortured by a rebel group, an experience that affects him far more profoundly and permanently than his years at Auschwitz. It will be up to Jack to fight for his father’s release. The sprawling story succeeds in keeping its focus on Abe and his relationships with the people he loves and hates. Although Abe’s ego is ample (“Yes, I am without a doubt a magnificent example of manhood!”), the reader has to admit that his high self-esteem is merited, and he makes for a compelling protagonist. Snitz does a good job of exploring the characters’ psyches, particularly the differences between Abe’s and Jack’s reactions to their wartime experiences, as well as the friendships that can develop among people who respect each other deeply. The novel works best for a reader who is willing to suspend disbelief to a generous degree (the limited physical effects of Abe’s three and a half years in Auschwitz, his role in geopolitics) and accepts the narrative’s abrupt transformation into a military thriller during Abe’s kidnapping in Vietnam. (The book’s final chapters return to his relationships, in keeping with the overall themes.) The prose is sometimes awkward (“An abundance of overconfidence falsely consumed him, a seemingly single Jew who continued to safely dodge the long arm of conflict”), and the characters, particularly Abe, have a tendency to engage in long, melodramatic interior monologues (“I am a master at the game about to be played. I am the Alpha Male. My first salvo across the bow has been fired!”) that can become grating. The reader who is willing to have patience with Abe’s sense of Destiny will find the story a rewarding one.

An expansive novel that explores the lasting effects of war on successive generations.

Pub Date: May 18, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5333-4164-8

Page Count: 454

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: May 17, 2019

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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by Harper Lee

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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.