A taut, well-written tale of the tragic, innocent victims of technological advancement.
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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
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
BOOK REVIEW
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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