A literary achievement: a complex, character-driven story that’s powerful in concept and execution.
Two brothers set out on Georgia’s mystical Altamaha River, "a long, dark muscle in the earth," to float down to the seacoast, intent on scattering the ashes of their father, "a man of the river….A keeper of it."
Lawton Loggins, a veteran SEAL warrior, and his younger brother, Hunter, a college student, are more similar than different: strong-willed, single-minded, hammered into their father’s iron concept of manhood. Hiram Loggins, their father, was a U.S. Navy Vietnam swift boat sailor. A troubled, complex man who forever "felt the blackness lapping at him, hungry," Hiram took up tidewater fishing, but he was unlucky, twice losing shrimp boats, one while hauling in "square grouper" (marijuana bales dropped by smuggler’s aircraft). Haunting Hiram’s memory was a youthful incident involving a childhood friend. His sons know that friend as Uncle King, an eccentric failed priest–turned–environmental guerilla. Before the trip, the sons, Lawton especially, were skeptical that their father’s death was an accident, but both are stunned when the truth is revealed, giving them knowledge that will redefine their memories and their futures. Expanding the Georgia lowland setting of this family saga is a narrative thread about the 1564 French settlement of Fort Caroline along the river. That struggle is detailed through the eyes of the expedition artist, Le Moyne, a man made real by a nuanced characterization. Contemporary drawings are reproduced. Thoroughly researched and expansively imagined, this portion of the novel is a tale of Utopia raped by greed, ineptness, arrogance, and deadly racism. Amid the deft descriptions of cypress swamps haunted by mythical beasts and poisoned by pollution, Taylor (Fallen Land, 2016) turns French fumbling, Hiram's rage, and the brothers' frustration into a common theme about humankind's struggle to understand its place in nature.
A literary achievement: a complex, character-driven story that’s powerful in concept and execution.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-11175-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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