Meticulous and candid, this slow-moving volume about small-town life should attract aficionados of American history.
An isolated farm boy discovers the wonderful—and war-torn—world outside his fence.
In this debut autobiographical novel from psychologist and memoirist Cromwell (A Time in China, 2014, etc.), Hanno Buchwald—the author’s fictional counterpart—experiences the aches and joys of a distinctly Midwestern coming-of-age. Arranged out of temporal order, the book’s 30 chapters bob and dive between Hanno’s birth in Linton, Indiana, in 1928 and an early adulthood marked by the anxieties of a nation in crisis. Opening with Hanno’s first memory—a peaceful, primordial recollection of a field of blue—the text soon traces the definite arc of a human life. Seemingly nothing is left out of this chronicle of Hanno’s upbringing. Included are events of traditional significance, like the uncomfortable funeral of his grandfather, as well as incidents that are refreshingly unusual (Hanno, with his parents’ guidance, learns male anatomical terms). In Linton, where residents embrace the chores of country homesteading and the mores of Christian small-town life, Hanno finds himself not only toiling at farmwork like milking and butchering, but also caring for his Alzheimer’s-stricken grandfather, who often wanders in search of “home.” Love and sexuality are frequent themes, from the genital exploration Hanno partakes in with his childhood friend Jenny Lee in the grape arbor to the romantic pursuit of Hanno and his friend by a burly but gentle soldier who arrives in Linton as part of the U.S. government’s efforts to drum up support for war bonds. Though chock-full of intimate memories and highly specific, sometimes odd, details—like the first time Hanno sees a public latrine—the book reaches its apotheosis in its striking portrait of the Pearl Harbor attack and its effect on Linton. One of Hanno’s elder twin brothers, Jay, perishes in the battle. The third-person narration, endearing and unpretentious, unspools like a fireside tale. But the emphasis on matter-of-factness over dramatic rhetoric eventually becomes a drawback, as does the account’s sluggish pace. While the book’s overarching purpose is difficult to discern, the reader should nevertheless enjoy the precision and insight that pervade the story as well as the historical details.
Meticulous and candid, this slow-moving volume about small-town life should attract aficionados of American history.Pub Date: July 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-7101-3
Page Count: 374
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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