Standard Holocaust potboiler, nicely narrated but nothing special.
The perils and wiles of a Jewish girl who escapes from Poland during WWII and travels to France to fight with the Resistance.
Zacharius (founder and CEO of Kensington Publishing) debuts with this story of Marisa (“Mia”) Levy, who grows up in a well-to-do family in Lodz, where her father runs a successful medical practice. Cultivated but provincial, the Levys have great hopes for Mia, a talented pianist, and send her to study in Paris. The war, unfortunately, puts an end to just about everyone’s ambitions—especially for Jews living under Nazi occupation. Mia’s father sizes up the situation right away: The Ghetto of Lodz (administered by the notorious Jewish collaborator Chaim Rumkowski) has been set up to bleed the Jews slowly of all their property before dispatching them to Auschwitz as quietly as possible. He tries to short-circuit the process by bribing an official for safe passage out of the country but is betrayed and ends up in the camps after all. Mia managedsto escape and get to Warsaw, where she joins an underground cell of Jewish partisans and is safely smuggled out of the occupied territories, first to Switzerland and later to the US. While staying with relatives in Brooklyn, Mia meets and falls in love with Vinnie Sforza, a big band clarinetist. She also makes contact with a secret branch of US Army Intelligence and provides them with information about the concentration camps and resistance movements in Europe. After America enters the war, Mia joins a branch of the special services that’s been set up to smuggle agents into France. Now, after all her trouble getting out, Mia is to return—but as an avenger rather than a victim this time. Since her parents are still alive in Auschwitz, her mission may become a rescue as well.
Standard Holocaust potboiler, nicely narrated but nothing special.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-8211-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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