Those iconic figures manage more human-speak than they did in Gettysburg (2003), and the battle scenes continue war-lovingly...
The Gingrich and Forstchen (military historian) “what-if” take on the Civil War gathers some steam.
After Lee’s glittering Gettysburg triumph (ending volume one of what bids fair to be at least a trilogy) the tactical question becomes—what next? Strike at the now vulnerable enemy capital? The decimated Army of the Potomac appears unable to protect Washington, and if Lee can occupy the city—as President Jefferson Davis is certain he can—perhaps the nightmarish struggle will be at last resolved. Failing that longed-for consummation, France and/or England might be willing to regard the Confederacy as legitimate and worthy of an alliance. But Lee’s vaunted Army of Northern Virginia isn’t what it once was. Victories have been costly. Manpower shortages are everywhere and critical. And, in the west, there’s this new player, a worrisome Union general named Ulysses S. Grant, fresh from his own monster victory at Vicksburg. Urged on by the overconfident Davis, Lee attempts to storm Washington, where he meets much stiffer resistance than predicted—mounted, among others, by the elegant and aristocratic Colonel Robert Shaw (Matthew Broderick in Glory) and his legendary fifty-fourth of Massachusetts. (“Lincoln saw the columns of veterans beginning to shake out into the battle line, the men professional-looking, moving sharply. . . and they were colored.”) The bloody chess game continues. Bold gambits are countered by desperate defenses as the armies maneuver for position, and always, always, with horrific slaughter of young men. Lincoln throws his full support behind Grant. Unaccountably, Jeff Davis’s support for Lee begins to waver. As this second installment ends, Grant seems headed for Richmond. Is that where Gingrich–Forstchen’s champion heavyweights will finally slug it out?
Those iconic figures manage more human-speak than they did in Gettysburg (2003), and the battle scenes continue war-lovingly rendered. Civil War buffs will be entertained.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-30937-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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