Smart entertainment.
In the latest from Griffin (Caucasus: A Journey to the Land Between Christianity and Islam, 2004, etc.), a petty criminal flees the carnage of the Great War and lands among con men in the Big Apple, where war of a different sort is being waged.
Londoner Ben Cramb’s crimes were very small indeed—a little boosting, a little fraud—but they were big enough to send him either to jail or the trenches. He and his chums choose the army. All but Ben fall to German shelling. After a period in the hospital where he is mistaken for an officer and gets a taste of a better life, he flees the war altogether, nursing a serious case of what was then called shell shock and is now called Posttraumatic stress disorder, stowing away on a freighter bound for he knows not where. He only wants to get the hell out of Europe. Where he does land is New York City in the still neutral United States. He’s not out of hot water, though. There are those in the city who will regard him not as a victim but a deserter. Robbed of his small stash of cash, Ben bottoms out in the Bowery where he is picked up by Julius McAteer, a professional con man who sees a role for the good looking Englishman in a major scam he’s about to pull. Ben, knowing that McAteer could turn him over to the Brits at any time, quickly learns his role in McAteer’s scheme. He’s the hook to bring Chicago moneyman Henry Jergens into McAteer’s range, where the flush Midwesterner can be fleeced in an elaborate hoax involving Tin Pan Alley. What neither McAteer nor Ben knows is that Jergens is on to them from the beginning, working his own con to revenge his mentor, whom McAteer robbed years earlier. Jergens’s accomplice is his flame, a beautiful actress for whom Ben, like most men, falls hard. When the various stings come to a climax, they involve the war Ben thought he had escaped.
Smart entertainment.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58642-132-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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