A sharply entertaining, in-depth tale of desert warriors.
This fourth volume of a World War II series focuses on the North Africa campaigns.
Marquis (Spies of the Midnight Sun, 2018, etc.) continues his streak of top-notch and extremely readable World War II novels with this story of the Africa operations that puts a biographical emphasis on a handful of figures, some famous and others lesser-known. German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the commander of the Afrika Korps at the peak of its glory and then during its worst defeats, of course features prominently. But so do Scottish Lt. Col. David Stirling, who led the Special Air Service in a series of raids on Axis airfields that eventually turned the tide of the theater’s conflict; Hekmat Fahmy, an Egyptian belly dancer who moonlighted as a German secret agent; British Maj. A.W. Sansom, a famed hunter of Axis spies and sympathizers whose story is told in intriguing detail; Lt. Johannes Eppler, a German spy who is expertly fleshed out here; and Col. Bonner Fellers, who was awarded a Distinguished Service Medal by President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his “uncanny ability” to predict the course of events in the Middle East. Through these players and a host of secondary figures, Marquis vividly reconstructs key events, including the oft-told tale of Operation Condor, which has been adapted for fiction and cinema but which the author approaches fresh. “With the relevant WWII records now available,” he writes, “it is time the true story is told.” Throughout the book, Marquis uses records and diaries in order to reconstitute dialogue, a tricky narrative move he handles with smooth skill. Likewise, he deftly evokes color and personality, whether it be his big marquee names or “the usual big-city lowlife of crooks, deserters, prostitutes, extortionists, fences, gunrunners, and hashish dealers” who populate the fringes of his story. This is a rigorous historical novel that reads like the best World War II fiction.
A sharply entertaining, in-depth tale of desert warriors.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-943593-25-5
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Mount Sopris Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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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