Again, the protean Kerr (Dark Matter, 2002, etc.) nails his setting and does justice to a large fictitious/for-real cast,...
It’s 1943, two years before V-E Day, and everybody knows the Germans are beaten—especially the Germans. So what’s to be done about it?
Strategies vary, of course. Roosevelt has called for unconditional surrender, a demand that worries the Brits, who feared it might be counterproductive in the way draconian measures often are, cornering the rat, as it were. Second Front, Stalin keeps repeating with Slavic stolidity, while holding his options open. Among the members of the German high command the imperative is to “cut our losses,” but Hitler, Himmler, Bormann et al., take differing approaches in support of diverse agendas. With this as background, young Willard Mayer is suddenly summoned to the Oval Office, where he’s given an unexpected assignment. Mayer, a former Princeton philosophy professor currently serving as an intelligence analyst with the OSS (precursor to the CIA), has managed to impress FDR with a book of his titled On Being Empirical. As a result, he’s plucked from a pool of midlevel colleagues and asked to examine the facts surrounding the massacre of 5,000 Polish soldiers, allegedly by the Soviets. This task, however, is mere prelude. The Big Three—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin—are about to meet in Teheran, and the president offers Willard an invitation to come along as a kind of assistant to illness-ridden Harry Hopkins. Self-assured Willard—described by one enamored lady as “the cleverest man I know”—takes it all in stride. And in the history-making events that follow, he plays the pivotal role he clearly regards as his due.
Again, the protean Kerr (Dark Matter, 2002, etc.) nails his setting and does justice to a large fictitious/for-real cast, but an emotionally inaccessible protagonist—who sees an affinity between himself and Hitler, inasmuch as both are without “moral values”—is hard to warm to.Pub Date: May 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15269-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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