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THE JUDICIOUS USE OF INTANGIBLES

A NOVEL BASED ON THE LIFE OF PIETRO BELLUSCHI

An edifying look at a major architect and the time he inhabited.

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A novel offers a dramatization of the life of a groundbreaking Italian architect.

In 1899, Pietro Belluschi is born in Ancona, “the Elbow” of Italy, a town that seems fossilized in the amber of history. (“The town got its name from ankón, Greek for elbow.”) His family moves to Rome when he is a young boy. He is stirred by the city’s cultural and artistic treasures but aspires to achieve something new and impactful, “to do something, to really shake things up, contribute to society.” After he’s wounded in World War I, he studies engineering at the University of Rome—it’s the only course of study that prominently figures drawing, his love. He wins a scholarship to study architecture at Cornell University in upstate New York. Belluschi eventually lands a job as a draftsman at A.E. Doyle & Associates, an inauspicious professional start. But he makes a reputation for himself, especially for designing the Equitable Building in Portland, Oregon, a striking structure wrapped in aluminum and among the first to be completely air conditioned. Unfortunately, the Pan Am building in New York City, his most iconic work, is subject to a “storm of criticism” and makes him something of a pariah in his field. Parker vividly brings to life Belluschi’s ambitions, which seem less driven by a specific artistic ideology and more by an unyielding attentiveness to the demands of his clients. Nevertheless, his artistic vision is a distinctively modern one, driven by a desire for functionality and the pragmatic exploitation of technology. The author’s prose is unfailingly lucid, if dramatically unliterary—often the book reads less like a novel than a biography. Still, Belluschi’s remarkable combination of pragmatism and artistic ambition is intelligently rendered, as is the historical context, especially the 20th-century development of architectural ideas. This is an informative introduction not only to Belluschi’s important work, but also the state of modern architecture.

An edifying look at a major architect and the time he inhabited.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 978-1-947431-46-1

Page Count: -

Publisher: Mentoris Project

Review Posted Online: June 9, 2022

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THE WOMEN

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

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A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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