Excessive, obsessive, overlong but filled with moments of grandeur, insight, tearful tragedy, and rousing derring-do: War...
A long, exhausting but worthy conclusion to The Sands of Pride (2002), following the roles of more than fifty historical and fictional characters depicting North Carolina’s role in the Civil War.
With its preceding volume, Trotter’s epic aspires to be an American literary equivalent of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. So many intricately observed characters and incidents pile up so that the story ceases to be about the bloodiest, most catastrophic conflict Americans have ever fought, and becomes instead a wonderfully complicated evocation of the role of pride in human destiny, with all the irony, heroism, passion, sentimentality, and violence that epic historical fiction demands. But Trotter's aspirations aren’t merely literary. Dialogue passages laden with history-speak, and tour-guide digressions about landscape and military lore, serve as correctives to the more prevalent scholarly attitude that North Carolina’s influence in the Civil War was more political than strategic, given that most of the more studied battles, including Gettysburg (where, Trotter informs us through one of his characters, a so-called eyewitness account of North Carolina's brave forces falling apart during the bloody disaster of Pickett’s Charge was a lowly canard!) occurred outside the state. Trotter can be forgiven some of his scholarly fusillades, having fired his biggest guns in his three-volume history The Civil War in North Carolina. The battle scenes here, especially the climactic assault on Fort Fisher, are astonishingly accomplished, and when Trotter probes the human side of history in his fiction, his epic soars, especially in his accounts of the fabulous sea battles around the Outer Banks among Union Navy patrols and dashing Confederate blockade runners, and the moving, conflicted heroism of the African American “buffalo” soldiers.
Excessive, obsessive, overlong but filled with moments of grandeur, insight, tearful tragedy, and rousing derring-do: War and Peace, American style.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1223-6
Page Count: 576
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
Much is made in these pages about the power of make-believe, and while the book falls short of magical, it’s still an...
The story behind the story that became the legendary movie The Wizard of Oz.
Letts (The Perfect Horse, 2016, etc.) builds her historical novel around Maud Gage Baum, the high-spirited wife of L. Frank Baum, who wrote the original Wizard of Oz books. In one of two intercut narratives, the 77-year-old Maud, who’d exerted a strong influence on her late husband, appears on the set of the movie in 1938; there, she encounters 16-year-old Judy Garland—cast as Dorothy—among others. The second narrative opens in Fayetteville, New York, in 1871 and traces Maud’s life from age 10: her girlhood as the daughter of an ardent suffragette; her brief time at Cornell University—she was one of the first women admitted there; her early marriage to Baum, an actor at the time; and the births of their four sons. Frank, a dreamer, was not so talented at making money, and the family endured a hardscrabble, peripatetic life until he scored as a writer. This part of the story is dramatic and sometimes-poignant, though it goes on a bit. (Read carefully, and you can spot some elements that made their ways into the books and movie.) The Hollywood part is more entertaining even if some of it feels implausible. Maud did meet Judy Garland and attend the premiere of the film in real life. But in the book she tries to protect and nurture Garland, who was at the mercy of her abusive stage mother and the filmmakers and was apparently fed amphetamines to keep her weight down. And while it’s true the movie’s best-loved song, “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” was almost cut at the last minute, the book has Maud persuading studio chief L.B. Mayer to keep it in.
Much is made in these pages about the power of make-believe, and while the book falls short of magical, it’s still an absorbing read.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-62210-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Old passions, prejudices, and grudges surface in a Washington State island town when a Japanese man stands trial for the murder of a fisherman in the 1950s. Guterson (The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind, 1989, etc.) has written a thoughtful, poetic first novel, a cleverly constructed courtroom drama with detailed, compelling characters. Many years earlier, Kabuo Miyamoto's family had made all but the last payment on seven acres of land they were in the process of buying from the Heine family. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and Kabuo's family was interned. Etta Heine, Carl's mother, called off the deal. Kabuo served in the war, returned, and wanted his land back. After changing hands a few times, the land ended up with Carl Heine. When Carl, a fisherman, is found drowned in his own net, all the circumstantial evidence, with the land dispute as a possible motive, points to Kabuo as the murderer. Meanwhile, Hatsue Miyamoto, Kabuo's wife, is the undying passion of Ishmael Chambers, the publisher and editor of the town newspaper. Ishmael, who returned from the war minus an arm, can't shake his obsession for Hatsue any more than he can ignore the ghost pains in his nonexistent arm. As a thick snowstorm whirls outside the courtroom, the story is unburied. The same incidents are recounted a number of times, with each telling revealing new facts. In the end, justice and morality are proven to be intimately woven with beauty—the kind of awe and wonder that children feel for the world. But Guterson communicates these truths through detail, not philosophical argument: Readers will come away with a surprising store of knowledge regarding gill-netting boats and other specifics of life in the Pacific Northwest. Packed with lovely moments and as compact as haiku—at the same time, a page-turner full of twists. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-100100-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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