Parry, a retired Army intelligence officer and former defense policy analyst, leaves fellow thriller writers flat as salted...
Enviably inspired, Parry (Bold Sons of Erin, 2003, etc.) fills pages with goldenrod sentences that nod and dazzle, as though he were a writer dropped from heaven.
In a Babylonian mash of tongues and argots representing the occupied city of New Orleans in 1863—bayou, Creole, voodoo, French, Pennsylvania Christian, Irish lyric—this is the sixth in the brilliantly researched and hauntingly rich Major Abel Jones Civil War mystery thrillers. Secret Agent Jones stories have a lovely simile-packed prose—and admirers of the lickety-split, Saturday morning serial Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom will delight in this Jones’s jaw-dropping cliffhangers that throng the opening chapters. The Major spins without stop from one demented bash to the next, jabbing villains with his cane sword, fighting off ether fumes, being caught in a house fire, falling three stories from a roof, and winding up naked in a big warm bath with a poisonous seven-foot snake swimming toward him. A thoughtful friend loads Abel with a stink-charm against haunts, which the foolish Abel tosses away, only to find himself stunned stiff as a musket barrel by voodoo. He’s rescued from this merry bit of a muddle by his old companion Mr. Barnaby B. Barnaby, who hustles the stiffening Abel off to a swamp-priestess whose magic skills save him for his next cliffhanger. He’s trailing whoever murdered the heiress Miss Susan Peabody, a Yankee beauty, her body left to wash up on a levee, all that lovely life lost quick as a nickel at the county fair. Then others vanish—and the dead are rumored to walk!
Parry, a retired Army intelligence officer and former defense policy analyst, leaves fellow thriller writers flat as salted cod.Pub Date: March 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-051392-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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
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
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