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
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 writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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