Call it a Spaghetti Epic: Manfredi’s narration of ancient Greek history owes as much to John Ford and George Lucas as it...
Two brothers in ancient Greece, separated at birth, come together to rescue their nation in the Persian Wars.
Italian architect Manfredi (Alexander, not reviewed, etc.) starts with twin brothers in Sparta. One of them, born with a crippled leg, will never be able to fight and so (in accordance with Spartan custom) is left in the woods to die. But he is found by the kindly Helot shepherd Kritolaos, who takes pity on the baby and brings him home to be raised as his own. Talos (as he is named) grows up among the Helots (who were enslaved by the Spartans) ignorant of his true ancestry. Brithos, the other twin, is raised to follow in the warrior traditions of his people. On his deathbed, Kritolaos entrusts Talos with his greatest possession: the armor and sword of Aristodemus, the defeated king of the Helots, which Kritolaos had secretly kept hidden away these many years. But Talos has no ambitions to glory. He tends to his flocks and falls in love with Antinea, the daughter of a local Helot tenant farmer. When Brithos, traveling through the region with some Spartan friends, comes upon Antinea and tries to rape her, however, Talos springs to her defense and discovers within himself a taste for battle he had never known before. Conscripted as an orderly to Brithos, he has his true identity revealed to him by an oracle. Meanwhile, Xerxes the Persian has raised the greatest army ever known and is on the verge of overrunning Greece. Brithos falls in battle, as does his father. Can Talos (now known as Kleidemos) save the day? He can certainly play his part.
Call it a Spaghetti Epic: Manfredi’s narration of ancient Greek history owes as much to John Ford and George Lucas as it does to Herodotus. But while this is a fairly accurate narration of ancient history, the private dramas involved are too outlandish and overdrawn to be read with a straight face.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-7542-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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