A skillfully rendered, if occasionally overwrought, portrayal of resolve during and after war.
This fictional family saga leading up to and through World War II is a finely detailed story of grit and survival, a story more universal than unique.
To call Revak’s debut a novel is a little misleading. While he uses novelistic techniques, this is really the true story of the Revak family, stretching back to the early years of the last century. We begin in early 1920s Scheindorf, a village in Hungary/Romania (boundaries are always shifting), with Gertrude Revak and her only child, Stefan. Stefan Sr. is in America, trying to earn enough money to bring them over. Stefan is a good son, old beyond his years, and he and his mother are hanging on grimly. Defeated by immigration laws, Stefan Sr. returns to Scheindorf. They are a family again and begin to prosper. Stefan marries Maria Ditzig, and they have two daughters. Everything is good, but as always, it does not last. Comes the war, and Stefan is drafted into the German army. Stefan, no Nazi, is appalled by every aspect of the war. And eventually the Revaks will have to flee Scheindorf, becoming displaced persons. The war ends, and Stefan frantically searches for his family. After a hair-raising effort, he becomes a POW, lost in the bureaucracy. (His eventual release involves an amazing coincidence that Revak assures us is true.) By the 1950s—Revak himself was born shortly after the war—the Revaks have reached the promised land of the USA. The book is well-written. Sometimes plot points—obstacles to be faced, tearful anxieties and then reunions, gut-wrenching disappointments—seem to be hammered home a little too hard. There is a balance here of cruelties and kindnesses that make these bromides real—human nature writ large. One lesson is that the aftermath of a war is almost as bad as the war itself. Includes a timeline, character list, and bibliography.
A skillfully rendered, if occasionally overwrought, portrayal of resolve during and after war.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-942545-70-5
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Legacy
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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