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HAM'S HEAVEN

Name: HAM'S HEAVEN
Author: Ori Gersht

A NOVEL

by Ori Gersht ; translated by Joanna Chen ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A taut, well-written tale of the tragic, innocent victims of technological advancement.

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Gersht’s historical novel tells the story of a young chimpanzee’s harsh training during the 20th century’s Space Race.

Oklahoma college student Bradley Rose works at the Institute for Primate Studies. Though he initially does it just to make some extra money, he grows close to one of the chimpanzees there. This leads to a gig with NASA—he becomes a trainer at the Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, where scientists are preparing chimpanzees for space flight. It’s the 1960s, and the United States and the Soviet Union are fighting to be the first to get an astronaut in outer space and, later, on the moon. Bradley is assigned to and quickly connects with “65” (“he took a step forward, lifted his arm and gently touched Bradley’s hand with one finger”); every chimp at Holloman has a number for a name, though 65 is later dubbed Ham. The training involves electric shocks as well as tests that render Ham disoriented and cause vomiting or headaches. Bradley soon wonders if winning the Space Race is worth the trauma that the chimpanzees are subjected to. Gersht pulls no punches in this story, which Chen has translated into English from Hebrew. Meticulous descriptions detail the grueling training Ham suffers in addition to his woeful capture in Cameroon when he was only a few months old. The author recounts relevant true-life tales, including those of Ota Benga, a Pygmy man “imprisoned” in the Bronx Zoo, and various rhesus monkeys who died in attempted space flights. Bradley is more a witness to Ham’s ordeal than an integral part of his story; while there’s no doubt that Ham trusts him and often calms at his touch or the sound of his voice, the narrative focuses more on Ham’s inhumane treatment than this particular human-chimpanzee bond. Readers will easily sympathize with the chimp and his harrowing plight. The text includes a handful of black-and-white photographs of the real-life Ham at NASA.

A taut, well-written tale of the tragic, innocent victims of technological advancement.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: July 25, 2025

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

HISTORICAL FICTION | MODERN | UNITED STATES

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THE CALAMITY CLUB

by Kathryn Stockett ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2026

Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.

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Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.

This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.

Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.

Pub Date: May 5, 2026

ISBN: 9781954118812

Page Count: 656

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

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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.