Pleasurably endearing for anybody with a soft spot for pop culture, Annie Hall–era Manhattan, and 20-somethingdom at its...
It’s 1980, and a young man is reckoning with his famous father’s breakdown with a little help from his New York City neighbor John Lennon.
If you know anything about Lennon and 1980, you already know the ending of Barbash’s second novel (Stay Up With Me, 2013, etc.). But that knowledge only heightens the bittersweet, nostalgic mood that Barbash ably conjures here; the book is suffused with warm memories of punk clubs, the “Miracle on Ice” U.S. Olympic hockey team, young romance, and the A-list residents at the storied Dakota apartments. The narrator, Anton, is the son of Buddy Winter, a talk show host in the Tom Snyder/Dick Cavett vein who scorched his reputation by having an on-air meltdown and storming off the set. Buddy is considering his options for a comeback (PBS? A big-three network? A newfangled cable channel?), and Anton is eager to assist, though ultimately the novel is concerned with how much we need to escape our parents' shadows. Anton’s guide for managing that is Lennon, the fellow Dakota resident and former Beatle with whom he forms an unlikely friendship. Their scenes together provide the novel’s most charming moments, as Anton gives Lennon sailing lessons off Cold Spring Harbor and serves as a sounding board as he writes songs in Bermuda. Barbash convincingly imagines Lennon’s easy, sardonic humor while he helps the young man learn how to be confident without being star-struck. The downside is that those scenes throw the rest of the narrative a bit off-balance. Anton’s siblings and love interests rarely feel like more than casual walk-on roles; Anton’s mother, stumping for Ted Kennedy’s failed presidential bid, plays only a slightly more substantial one.
Pleasurably endearing for anybody with a soft spot for pop culture, Annie Hall–era Manhattan, and 20-somethingdom at its most freewheeling.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-225819-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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