Historical novelist Fleming (The Officer's Wives, 1981; Time and Tide, 1987, etc.) offers a melodramatic saga set against the backdrop of the First World War. American Polly Warden, an incipient feminist and active pacifist, turns down marriage to a millionaire to go off to Paris in 1917, seeking nobility in the ravages of war. As a nurse in a French hospital, she becomes romantically involved with a disillusioned young surgeon, in large part as defense against the horrifying reality of the front lines. After the doctor's tragic death, his very rich father tries to use Polly's pacifist background as part of a secret plan to surrender his country to Germany (there was a great internal struggle about whether to continue the war effort in France in the months just prior to the arrival of the American forces). Instead, she ends up working as a counteragent on behalf of Clemenceau (sacrificing much of her reputation in the process), then becomes an ambulance driver, first for the British, later for the Americans. All of this intertwines her life with that of General Malvern Hill Bliss, who has been rescued from incipient alcoholism and self-destruction (brought on by the loss of his wife and son in the Philippines) by ``Black Jack'' Pershing and put in charge of the Lafayette Division, one of the first American units in Europe. Bliss, aided in no small part by the insights of the beautiful Englishwoman Anita Sinclair, sees through the politics and hypocrisy of British and French commanders who want to misuse American forces, but he's powerless to do much about it. As the war reaches its bloody climax, he can only send his men to die needlessly. An intriguing enough story of an emerging new world (and most especially of a new and modern-style woman), but even Fleming fans will have to be willing to plow through an abundance of pedestrian and (especially in matters sexual) awkward prose.
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-017983-X
Page Count: 612
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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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