A biographical novel with an overly reverential tone but filled with intriguing historical tidbits.
Welch’s (Why the Monkees Matter, 2016, etc.) historical novel pays tribute to the real-life Filippo Mazzei, an Italian surgeon, merchant, revolutionary, and writer who was friends with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
Mazzei is born on Christmas Day, 1730, in the small Tuscan town of Poggio a Caiano, the third son of a mother whose love and devotion were reserved for her firstborn, Jacopo. Fortunately, Mazzei’s paternal grandfather is a kind, generous role model through his first seven years. And the sting of his mother’s favoritism for Jacopo, a manipulative thief, serves Mazzei well, propelling him into a life of adventure and accomplishment: “I will spend the rest of my life proving you have given all your love to the wrong son,” he tells his mother. He studies medicine in Florence, then moves to the port city of Livorno to practice. Even as a child, he’d begun questioning the injustices in life, but in Livorno, he begins interacting with a wide circle of intellectuals with whom he debates history and philosophy. Eventually, he moves to London and opens a shop in 1764, establishing himself as a successful importer. More critically, he meets Benjamin Franklin; it’s a connection that leads to Mazzei’s 1773 voyage to the American Colonies, where he builds his new home adjacent to that of Thomas Jefferson—just in time for the American Revolution. Welch’s volume rests somewhere between novel and biography, lacking the dramatic passion of the former and the cited source material of the latter. Still, she offers an unusual, if at times hagiographic, portrait of a man whose importance to the founding of the United States has indeed been generally overlooked. Most intriguing are the sections detailing Mazzei’s close friendship with Jefferson, which led the two to work together on the text of the Declaration of Independence. Their wide-ranging conversations, as depicted by Welch, reveal as much about Jefferson as they do about Mazzei; they include the latter’s long-held belief in equality and justice as well as their shared interests in agriculture, architecture, language, and religion.
A biographical novel with an overly reverential tone but filled with intriguing historical tidbits.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947431-07-2
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Barbera Foundation
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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