A captivating story, though Llywelyn’s idealization of the Republican cause can lead her to play fast and loose with some...
Third installment—1916 (1998), 1921 (2001)—in Llywelyn’s series about modern Ireland.
Earlier, we met Republicans Ned Halloran and Henry Mooney, who fought (as courier and journalist, respectively) to support the doomed 1916 Easter Rising. Now, in the aftermath of the 1921 Partition that divided Ireland into two states, Halloran and Mooney are bitter men. Mooney is so disillusioned, in fact, that he emigrates to Texas and sets up his own newspaper. But first he pays for the education, in Switzerland, of Halloran’s daughter Ursula and helps her find work in the Irish Civil Service when she graduates. Ursula is every inch her father’s girl—fiercely independent and a Republican to the marrow. She takes a job with the newly formed Radio Éireann and eventually becomes Ireland’s first woman broadcaster. Her position gives her a privileged insight into the complicated relations between world events and Irish politics, and she watches with growing satisfaction as the Irish President Eamon De Valera takes advantage of the turmoil of the 1930s to wrest more and more concessions from the British. Soon, however, Ursula finds herself in a crisis of her own making when she realizes she’s pregnant—and unsure whether the father is the dull Finbar Cassidy or the dashing Lewis Banes. In order to escape the opprobrium faced by unwed mothers, Ursula moves to Geneva and takes a job with the League of Nations. There, she witnesses the inevitable eruption of WWII as she gives birth to her son Barry. She returns home toward the end of the war (or the Emergency, as it was known in neutral Ireland) and raises Barry on her father’s farm in County Clare. The climax comes in 1949, when Ireland (minus Ulster, of course) is proclaimed a fully independent republic.
A captivating story, though Llywelyn’s idealization of the Republican cause can lead her to play fast and loose with some shadier aspects of modern Irish politics.Pub Date: March 3, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-86753-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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