Awkward transitions and blustering characterizations of Twain, Sherman, and others don't undercut the emotional punch here:...
Sentimental but stirring salute to Ulysses S. Grant that visits the former Civil War general and American president near the end of his life, as he suffers stoically with poverty and throat cancer while struggling to complete his memoirs.
Previously dismissed as a cigar-chewing drunk who ruthlessly wasted troops in battle, presided over a corrupt administration as a two-term president, and blithely permitted Sherman to carry out his brutal slaughter of Native Americans, Grant is becoming the darling of revisionist Civil War historians. For them, the Ohio-born warrior is an American icon whose triumph over alcoholism, depression, and business failure taught him that war was not a God-given opportunity to fight romantically for a worthy cause but, rather, a horrific contest in which survival was more important than winning. Parry (The Wolf's Pack, 1998, etc.) opens his story at Appomattox, with a mud-spattered, unusually perceptive Grant quietly enduring Lee's aristocratic bombast out of pity for his beaten rival. The narrative then leaps ahead to a New York surgery where a team of physicians can't bear to tell the former president, recently impoverished by a corrupt business partner, that he has less than a year to live. After refusing offers of public and private charity, Grant agrees to write his memoirs for Mark Twain's nascent publishing company, hoping to earn enough to provide for his wife and children. From here on, a series of battlefield flashbacks fill in some of the more speculative blanks in the memoir, where Grant learns from his awful misjudgments and draws strength from so much wartime misery—strength that helps him complete his book and die with amazing dignity.
Awkward transitions and blustering characterizations of Twain, Sherman, and others don't undercut the emotional punch here: Parry's burnished Grant is nothing less than an American saint, whose proud but lonely end will bring tears from the most hardened Robert E. Lee fan.Pub Date: June 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-345-42728-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
