Beyond that, little, really, is delved into, although the war, suffering and deprivation are vivid.
Only the second full-length novel from Bass (The Hermit’s Story, 2002), this takes an episode from Texas history that provides grit and suffering aplenty—while matters psychological remain generally unstirred.
In the 1830s, Texas has become an independent nation under the presidency of Sam Houston, but there’s still plenty of bad blood between the Mexicans and those new foreigners to the north. And so it is that after “a band of infidels, Mexican nationals,” cross the Rio Grande, attack San Antonio and flee, retaliation is called for. And when two military men, Captain Fisher and Captain Green, come through the town of LaGrange on the lookout for militiamen, even our 16-year-old narrator, surname of Alexander, and his friend James Shepherd join up. A band of 500 sets out, ostensibly to patrol the Rio Grande but in actuality—though known only to the commanders—to find revenge, an aim that leads to acts of wanton pillage, rapine and atrocity in Laredo and, such behavior being not yet sufficient, to the crossing of the river and invasion of Mexico as a harassing force. From there on, all goes downhill, as Jim Shepherd loses an arm, then his comradely goodness of character, then his life, and as the entire militia, defeated in battle in Ciudad Mier, is taken prisoner by the Mexicans. Near-starvation, exhaustion, attempts at escape (one of them through the mountains: a disaster)—all cut away at the number of survivors. Punishment at one point is the diezmo—the shooting of one in ten, decided by lot. Our narrator, though, somehow survives everything, including long and truly merciless imprisonment in the ungodly carved-from-a-mountain prison in Perote. After release, and after return home, “only a handful” remain of the 308 who crossed into Mexico. Now, at age 66 and telling the tale, the narrator wonders, “Why was I one of the tiny handful who survived the entire journey?”
Beyond that, little, really, is delved into, although the war, suffering and deprivation are vivid.Pub Date: May 13, 2005
ISBN: 0-395-92617-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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
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
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