The prolific Busch returns to the genre of historical reconstruction he attempted so successfully in The Mutual Friend (1978), which reimagined the Victorian world of Dickens. This story is set in New York City in 1867, and also in the painfully vivid memories and premonitions experienced by its narrator, Civil War casualty William Bartholomew, a former Northern Army sniper whose destroyed visage is concealed beneath a specially constructed mask. The present action emerges from Bartholomew’s relationships with: his old army comrade Samuel Mordechai, an idealistic journalist determined to write the truth about war; “Tackabury’s Adam,” a freed slave whose condition of actual unfreedom Bartholomew strongly empathizes with; Chun Ho, a widowed laundress herself uneasily assimilated to postbellum America; a beautiful Creole prostitute, Jessie, who authors an ingenious liberationist plot; and a deputy customs-inspector named Herman Melville, whose once promising literary career has stalled. Busch gets a seductive narrative rhythm going almost instantly: Bartholomew’s meetings with “M” (whose work he has read), visits to the lavish brothel where Jessie toils, and adventures as an importer-exporter and commercial speculator are juxtaposed against graphic and disturbing flashbacks to wartime ordeals like his assassination of a brave “Rebel whore” and his discovery of a common grave crammed with massacred civilians (both incidents superbly foreshadow more horrors to come). Bartholomew is a brilliantly imagined character, and the book vibrates with beautifully realized (mostly nocturnal) period scenes. A single improbability aside (we’re never fully persuaded that this “acid-etched man of measureless cruelty” would devote himself to combating slavery), Busch offers a gripping story that climaxes unforgettably when a contraband-filled ship reaches port, and concludes with bitter irony when Bartholomew and Mordechai attend Charles Dickens’s public reading of his fable of resurrection, A Christmas Carol. Another stunning dramatization of Busch’s commanding theme: that the world is a battlefield of chaos and dangers from which the innocent must—and may never—be protected.
Pub Date: May 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-609-60235-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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