An occasionally funny historical farce.
A satire depicts George Armstrong Custer’s part in the American Indian Wars.
In 1868, in the proximate wake of the Civil War, Andrew Johnson is president, his ascendancy to the position the consequence of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Portrayed by Sumrall (Metal Storm, 2015) as insane—bipolar and schizophrenic—Johnson is under enormous pressure to counter seasonal raids by warlike Native Americans throughout the Oklahoma Territory. Johnson only trusts Lt. Col. Custer (alternately referred to as Boy General and Yellow Hair) to lead a massive attack of the 7th Cavalry against the Native Americans in the Washita Valley, an operation boldly designed by Gen. Philip Sheridan, an opioid addict, during the winter. The strategy is meant to overwhelm a modestly sized village jointly governed by the pacifistic Chief Little Rock and Black Kettle. But when a sizable Native American army returns from a raid and refuses to be restrained by the chiefs, Custer and his men find themselves suddenly overpowered. The author’s amusingly eccentric account parodies the real madness of the time: Custer’s wife, Elizabeth, so ambitiously boosts her husband’s career, she sends racy photos of herself to the president. And the pathologically suspicious Johnson tortures Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in the basement of the White House in order to solicit a confession of his perfidy. At one point, fully committing himself to a surrealist brand of high absurdity, the author introduces a spacecraft manned by humanlike aliens. Sumrall’s satire hits some authentically humorous notes, and he has an intriguing sensitivity to the egomaniacal hubris of grand historical actors. In addition, the author achieves something rare—a historical novel whose plot defies readers’ anticipations. But the story devolves into slapstick silliness and eventually becomes tedious. Furthermore, the prose is ecstatically overwrought and leaden as well as confusing: “The florid, hybrid clothing apparel added a kaleidoscope of color to the growing number of warriors. This seething, tinctured panoply of garish pigmentation was converging into a sentient, multihued killing entity.” This is more a comedy routine than a volume of historical fiction, which might work if it were not a novel’s length.
An occasionally funny historical farce.Pub Date: March 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9973754-7-3
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Shanti Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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