by Phil Adamo ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
An engaging and humorous historical approach to contemporary racism.
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In this novel, two medieval scholars are asked to spy on their professor—who may have nefarious ties to a White supremacist group.
When Molly Isaacson first talks to Quinton Quick—they are both studying medieval history at Yale—the exchange doesn’t go so well. Molly unabashedly expresses her astonishment over Quinton’s race: “You’re a medievalist? But you’re Black!” Despite the rocky start, they quickly become good friends, both students under the intellectually impressive and controversial professor Abe Kantorowicz, who has garnered a reputation for breaking bread with Nazis and fascists, if only to criticize them. Molly and Quinton are suddenly approached by a humorously mysterious figure—despite the gravity of the story’s themes, Adamo often shoots for lightsome, if glib, comedy—FBI agent Nathaniel Mapp. With a “conspiratorial air,” Mapp asks the two students to surveil Kantorowicz, who he believes is working furtively with a White supremacist group. The author makes it tantalizingly unclear if Mapp’s suspicions are correct. Shortly after, Kantorowicz asks Molly and Quinton to assist him with an “archaeological experiment” to find a symbol that replaces the swastika as a unifying symbol of bigoted groups, a supposedly academic exercise in historical lucidity. Adamo intelligently combines the topical and the esoteric—at the heart of the novel is the alt-right’s appropriation of medieval symbols to brand their hateful cause. But this virtue doubles as a vice—the book flirts with an excessive academicism. Part of it reads like a classroom lecture while other sections are in fact precisely that. In addition, the author can’t resist drawing some facile and didactic conclusions about the nature of racism. Nevertheless, the story is refreshingly eccentric, and while it sometimes seems in danger of taking itself too seriously, the author’s comic impulses chasten that urge. This is an engrossing tale, a delightfully peculiar blend of intellectual and criminal investigation.
An engaging and humorous historical approach to contemporary racism.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 311
Publisher: Split Infinitive Books
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
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Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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