Tender and action-packed, a historical western with everything but the ending.
A stubborn young man with a checkered past tries to find his path at a U.S. Army base in the Arizona frontier.
Tucson is a dangerous place in 1871, brimming with thieves, whores and daily brawls among the Apache, entrepreneurial trailblazers and drunken U.S. soldiers. Nearby at Camp Bowie, Ned Thorne, the educated 17-year-old son of a Hartford shopkeeper, doesn’t quite fit in. Clearly running away from something, which he achingly alludes to in unfinished letters to his brother, Ned both fears and uses his violent temper, hoping it will prove his manhood to his elders, particularly his partner, a conniving man named Brickner. Ned becomes the assistant to the captain, and they form a tentative bond, finally revealing that Ned’s shame came from his brother’s accidental death, for which he has taken responsibility. Tragedy strikes when Apaches invade a nearby ranch, killing two men and kidnapping a woman. Upon investigation, Ned’s illiterate bunkmate steals the woman’s journal and bequeaths it to Ned, who quickly becomes engrossed in her story. Like Ned, the woman had fled her New England home, though the frontier was not what she expected—her betrothed died en route, and she became stuck in a loveless marriage to an Arizona rancher. Both the journal and a series of bloody squabbles with the Apache lead to an impromptu mission to save the woman, which takes the men into unchartered territory, results in a bloodbath and tests young Ned’s fortitude. After building suspense, the author abruptly abandons both his hero and his reader in the aftermath of battle. Nonetheless, Cobb, in his first novel since his debut (Crazy Heart, 1987), ably recreates the American frontier.
Tender and action-packed, a historical western with everything but the ending.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6119-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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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