For a reader who knows nothing at all about John Brown, this is a satisfactory but not altogether inspiring place to start.
A docudrama about the insurgent abolitionist John Brown (1800-1859).
With racial conflict once again occupying center stage in the national dialogue, the present day seems especially ripe for a fresh new biographical portrait of the anti-slavery agitator whose scorched-earth campaign in the late 1850s presaged and likely hastened the Civil War. Weaving historical record with his own imaginings of what Brown, his family, and others may have said 160 years ago, Karl, the author of a teen novel, The Toom County Mud Race (1992), chronicles Brown’s three-year war against slavery. He begins with the 1856 incident in which abolitionist Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner is beaten bloody in the Senate chamber by a South Carolina congressman, which serves as prelude to Brown’s battle that same year against pro-slavery forces trying to keep Kansas in their column. The book climaxes with the ill-fated 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, to initiate an armed slave uprising and concludes with Brown’s subsequent arrest, trial, and execution. Karl’s overall depiction of Brown is that of a ruminative, intensely religious family man whose conversation is all but overrun with references to the divine. (“Everything moves in sublime harmony in the government of God…Not so with us poor creatures.”) He is also shown to be remarkably composed in battle and quietly insistent in conversation with such eminences as his great ally Frederick Douglass, who warned him of trouble at Harpers Ferry. Such factors offer a needed corrective to past portraits of Brown tending to paint him as a wild-eyed and ruthless fanatic. The problem is that Karl bends so far backward toward straightforward characterization that he mutes, if not altogether loses, so much of what made Brown colorful and vivid. The result resembles nothing so much as a grown-up version of biographies written for teenagers in which fact and fiction uneasily coexist in a diorama of historical events where surfaces are easier to perceive than the substance behind them.
For a reader who knows nothing at all about John Brown, this is a satisfactory but not altogether inspiring place to start.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61373-633-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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