An entertaining biographical novel rich in action and period details.
An Italian-born adventurer battles Austrians, Russians, Confederates, and anti-immigrant bigotry in this fictionalized saga of a real-life American hero.
Lamphier (The Great Show, 2017, etc.) novelizes the outlines of Louis Palma di Cesnola’s busy life while imaginatively fleshing out scenes of romance, combat, and trauma. The second son of an Italian count, Cesnola bitterly ships out to military school at the age of 14 in 1846 after his true love marries his older brother, the heir to the family title. His timing is great: He soon enlists in the Sardinian army to join Italy’s war of liberation against the Austrian Empire; he weathers endless boredom in camp punctuated by extreme panic in a saber melee, for which he wins promotion to lieutenant. Cashiered after getting caught in bed with a general’s wife, he finds his way to the Crimean War, where he again sits around in squalid camps but gets in a few wild hours slaughtering Russian soldiers. Then he’s off to New York under the Americanized name Louis P. di Cesnola to wed heiress Mary Reid and join the Union Army as a cavalry colonel in the Civil War. Many battles with Confederate cavalry genius Jeb Stuart ensue until Cesnola is captured. His story turns dark and harrowing as he and his fellow POWs face death from disease and semistarvation in harsh Confederate camps. Cesnola survives and, after the war, serves as U.S. consul in Cyprus, where he turns his hand to archaeology and excavates many ancient artifacts; that new profession eventually lands him the directorship of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The real Cesnola led an iconic 19th-century life, and Lamphier’s energetic novel deftly conveys the dizzying self-reinventions he undertook in that bustling age. Her rousing narrative features much engrossing military and archaeological lore, generous helpings of mayhem (“Parnell slashed at his opponent, sinking his saber deep in the man’s neck”), and a piquant love story, as Cesnola and Mary’s initially pragmatic relationship—she’s lonely; he’s broke—deepens into profound affection. The story’s Italian-American pride theme is sometimes intrusive, with Cesnola quick to blame slights and reversals on anti-Italian prejudice among the WASP establishment. Still, when his blood is up, he’s a plucky, appealing hero.
An entertaining biographical novel rich in action and period details.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947431-06-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Barbera Foundation
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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