A gripping, hard-to-put-down thriller.
Political upheaval in Egypt circa 1954 threatens the location shooting of The Ten Commandments—and the life of a young local hired as Cecil B. DeMille's personal assistant.
A film buff, Ali Hassan is initially thrilled to work for DeMille, whose swan song this biblical epic proves to be. But his enthusiasm is dimmed by the director's imperious and temperamental ways. And his safety is compromised by the violent aims of the Muslim Brotherhood extremist group, which targets newly installed Prime Minister Gamal Abdel Nasser for his anti-theocratic ways and for cozying up to the blasphemous Hollywoodians. One of the group's outspoken members is Sherif, Ali's close but combative cousin, who pressures Ali into abetting a planned terrorist attack on the film set. After it becomes known that Ali, as DeMille's driver, ran over an influential imam to escape a demonstrating mob in Cairo, it's only a matter of time before he faces some very bad music. He ends up spending many years in prison, where he's beaten and tortured by an escaped Nazi welcomed into Egypt—supposedly "a new beacon of liberty"—for such purposes. The book is presented as Ali's firsthand account of his experiences, written years later for his radicalized American grandson, who sporadically emails his responses to it from jihadi training grounds unknown. These interruptions prove superficial in linking fundamentalism past and present and examining religious belief, but otherwise this departure by Blauner from his urban thrillers—including Sunrise Highway (2018) and Proving Ground (2017)—is great storytelling, a coming-of-age tale with a love story at its heart. The drama is leavened with wry accounts of the mercurial DeMille and his buff star, Charlton "Chuck" Heston. A Jewish documentary filmmaker thought to be an Israeli spy is straight out of classic noir. All in all, an inspired idea skillfully executed.
A gripping, hard-to-put-down thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-2508-5101-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
If it’s possible for America to have a poet laureate, why can’t James McBride be its storyteller-in-chief?
McBride follows up his hit novel Deacon King Kong (2020) with another boisterous hymn to community, mercy, and karmic justice.
It's June 1972, and the Pennsylvania State Police have some questions concerning a skeleton found at the bottom of an old well in the ramshackle Chicken Hill section of Pottstown that’s been marked for redevelopment. But Hurricane Agnes intervenes by washing away the skeleton and all other physical evidence of a series of extraordinary events that began more than 40 years earlier, when Jewish and African American citizens shared lives, hopes, and heartbreak in that same neighborhood. At the literal and figurative heart of these events is Chona Ludlow, the forbearing, compassionate Jewish proprietor of the novel’s eponymous grocery store, whose instinctive kindness and fairness toward the Black families of Chicken Hill exceed even that of her husband, Moshe, who, with Chona’s encouragement, desegregates his theater to allow his Black neighbors to fully enjoy acts like Chick Webb’s swing orchestra. Many local White Christians frown upon the easygoing relationship between Jews and Blacks, especially Doc Roberts, Pottstown’s leading physician, who marches every year in the local Ku Klux Klan parade. The ties binding the Ludlows to their Black neighbors become even stronger over the years, but that bond is tested most stringently and perilously when Chona helps Nate Timblin, a taciturn Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of his community, conceal and protect a young orphan named Dodo who lost his hearing in an explosion. He isn’t at all “feeble-minded,” but the government wants to put him in an institution promising little care and much abuse. The interlocking destinies of these and other characters make for tense, absorbing drama and, at times, warm, humane comedy. McBride’s well-established skill with narrative tactics may sometimes spill toward the melodramatic here. But as in McBride’s previous works, you barely notice such relatively minor contrivances because of the depth of characterizations and the pitch-perfect dialogue of his Black and Jewish characters. It’s possible to draw a clear, straight line from McBride’s breakthrough memoir, The Color of Water (1996), to the themes of this latest work.
If it’s possible for America to have a poet laureate, why can’t James McBride be its storyteller-in-chief?Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422946
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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