Foster uses her strong research skills and her skill at turning historical names into living, breathing humans to great...
In the second book of her series, Foster continues her examination of the famous slave uprising led by Nat Turner.
In 1831, a slave of Ethiopian lineage inspired a rag-tag band to embark on an attempt to shake off the rules of their cruel masters and fight oppression. When they were finished, 50 whites had died and Turner entered the history books. Foster obviously feels a close bond with Turner and his followers. The novel traces his journey side-by-side with that of famed abolitionist and author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Foster touches on Turner’s roots, invoking his Ethiopian mother and grandmother, and writes of both the early and late days of his enslavement. The heartbreaking descriptions of slave life are vivid: stumbling on frozen feet, starving slaves gathered in cold, unheated shacks to comfort one another and pool what little food they had. Foster examines the lies surrounding Turner’s capture, trial, imprisonment and hanging; the stories of his accusers; and the moral and emotional journey taken by Stowe. She brings historical characters to life with a deft and sure hand. Her technique of switching points of view and zooming back and forth in time won’t appeal to those who prefer a more linear approach to storytelling, but even they will appreciate Foster’s attention to detail and her ability to evoke raw, authentic emotion.
Foster uses her strong research skills and her skill at turning historical names into living, breathing humans to great advantage.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7812-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
"I'm Yakov Fixer... I'm the kind of man who finds it perilous to be alive." He is childless, as the Talmud said, alive but dead, and deserted by his wife. He leaves his native shtetl for Kiev to pass for a few months as a goyim. Then he is arrested for having counterfeited a name and is later accused of killing a child in a ritual murder. This is the Russia of Nicholas the Second, the increasing irrationale of anti-Semitism, the prophetic "stink of future evil"— and there seems to be no question that this is Malamud's strongest book. There may be more question whether Yakov is one of his "saint-schlemiehls." He's a simple man, an ignorant man, but he reads a little (Spinoza) and he thinks. Even in his outraged innocence he knows that he is a "rational being and a man must try to reason." During these long months of interrogation and internment, he develops a certain philosophy of his own even though "it's all skin and bones." But speculate as he does, protest as he does, how accept the fact that he is one of the chosen people, chosen to represent the destiny and racial guilt of the Jews? As a Job, and several of Malamud's earlier characters have been termed Jobs, he repudiates suffering and eventually his hate is stronger than his fear... Anticipating all the inevitable comparisons to which the book is equal, Malamud's Fixer, less ideological than Koestler's Darkness at Noon, less symbolic than Kafka's Trial, has elements of each but a more exposed humanity than either of them. It is a work of commanding power.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1966
ISBN: 1412812585
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1966
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Two lessons: Don’t discount a woman just because she’s made of clay, and consider your wishes carefully should you find that...
Can’t we all just get along? Perhaps yes, if we’re supernatural beings from one side or another of the Jewish-Arab divide.
In her debut novel, Wecker begins with a juicy premise: At the dawn of the 20th century, the shtetls of Europe and half of “Greater Syria” are emptying out, their residents bound for New York or Chicago or Detroit. One aspirant, “a Prussian Jew from Konin, a bustling town to the south of Danzig,” is an unpleasant sort, a bit of a bully, arrogant, unattractive, but with enough loose gelt in his pocket to commission a rabbi-without-a-portfolio to build him an idol with feet of clay—and everything else of clay, too. The rabbi, Shaalman, warns that the ensuing golem—in Wecker’s tale, The Golem—is meant to be a slave and “not for the pleasures of a bed,” but he creates her anyway. She lands in Manhattan with less destructive force than Godzilla hit Tokyo, but even so, she cuts a strange figure. So does Ahmad, another slave bottled up—literally—and shipped across the water to a New York slum called Little Syria, where a lucky Lebanese tinsmith named Boutros Arbeely rubs a magic flask in just the right way and—shazam!—the jinni (genie) appears. Ahmad is generally ticked off by events, while The Golem is burdened with the “instinct to be of use.” Naturally, their paths cross, the most unnatural of the unnaturalized citizens of Lower Manhattan—and great adventures ensue, for Shaalman is in the wings, as is a shadowy character who means no good when he catches wind of the supernatural powers to be harnessed. Wecker takes the premise and runs with it, and though her story runs on too long for what is in essence a fairy tale, she writes skillfully, nicely evoking the layers of alienness that fall upon strangers in a strange land.
Two lessons: Don’t discount a woman just because she’s made of clay, and consider your wishes carefully should you find that magic lamp.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-211083-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
