A long, bloody, vastly entertaining story.
The heroic stand of the Knights of St. John against the much larger army of Islamic invaders in 16th-century Malta gets epic treatment in the first, fat volume of a projected trilogy.
British psychiatrist, screenwriter and novelist Willocks (Bloodstained Kings, 1998, etc.) portrays Renaissance warfare with gusto, stirring the depravity of the Inquisition into the siege of Malta, where Suleiman the Magnificent has sent his vast armies to obliterate the Knights Hospitaller of St. John, a monastic order with a power base nearly as rich as the pope’s. The story hangs on the broad shoulders of Mattias Tannhauser, son of a German blacksmith, who was abducted and adopted by raiding Moslems, giving him vast insight into both Christian and Moslem viewpoints in the unsettled world of the Mediterranean. Tannhauser is lured to the island fortress by the ravishing Franco-Maltese countess Carla La Penautier, who hopes the currently retired warrior will leave the pleasures of his present life as a Sicilian merchant to locate somewhere in Malta the illegitimate son who was snatched from her when she was 15. Tannhauser, bewitched by Carla, takes on the job, unaware that the missing lad’s father is the brilliant Dominican inquisitor Ludovico Ludovici, himself headed for Malta, for his own evil reasons. Colluding with the supremely cynical Cardinal Michele Ghisleri, Ludovico plans to bring the too-independent Knights permanently to heel, subjecting them to the will of his patron, who will one day be known as Pius V. The two protagonists are plunged into the lopsided battle between the vastly outnumbered Maltese and the supremely confident armies of the Sultan, all the while carrying on their own private battle to the death. Stone walls crumble, war machines rumble, bodies fill the ditches, and once in a while there’s some terrific sex.
A long, bloody, vastly entertaining story.Pub Date: May 15, 2007
ISBN: 0-374-24865-6
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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