A winner-takes-all scramble for power so brutal, arrogant, and cunning that one craves for a straight biography that might...
Rollicking Irish-flavored tale about an immigrant who rose to Tammany Hall, retired to luxury and horses in Palm Springs and his native land, but was forever shunned by the high society he craved.
As he did with Michael Collins in Rebel Heart (2000, not reviewed), the Irish O’Farrell delivers a sprawling story of a violent, corrupt and—until now—despised minor player in New York political history. Born into a Protestant landholding family, the real-life Richard “Boss” Croker (1841–1922) came to the US when, O’Farrell suggests, his family’s estate was bankrupted by the potato famine, Croker’s womanizing, and his ne’er-do-well father, Eyre Coote Croker. After working as a vet in Cincinnati, father Eyre brings his family back to New York, where Richard demonstrates remarkable talents as a machinist, horse rider, brawler, and, most significantly, protégé of Mike Walsh, colorful Irish powerbroker working his way into the Tammany machine through gang violence, union control, and the shrewd manipulation of human nature to reward those loyal and wreak bitter vengeance on all the others. O’Farrell contrasts young Croker’s wily rise with the fictionalized misfortunes of other Irish characters, such as poor Nellie Hurley, an innocent serving girl who, after being raped by Croker’s father, gives birth to a son and raises him relatively unmolested inside a New York brothel thanks to of a lesbian relationship with the madam. As for Croker, he left New York with a vast fortune, but did he really help finance the Irish war of independence? O’Farrell’s need to make Croker a hero for all seasons falters at the end, with the hero marrying an “Indian princess” young enough to be his granddaughter and barely surviving a lawsuit from his children that would have declared him demented.
A winner-takes-all scramble for power so brutal, arrogant, and cunning that one craves for a straight biography that might sift the truth from the sheer heroic. Still, delightful Irish dialect and a gas-lit New York.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2004
ISBN: 1-903305-10-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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