A novel that is as enjoyable as it is intelligent: a truly brilliant book and a remarkable achievement.
A campus novel set in 1959 that explores a footnote in the life of Benzion Netanyahu, father of Benjamin Netanyahu, the then-future Israeli prime minister.
Cohen's narrator, Ruben Blum, is an economics professor at a college in upstate New York (a thinly veiled Cornell); he specializes in the hilariously boring field of tax history, and he is the lone Jewish faculty member in his department. As the token Jew, he is assigned to lead the committee considering whether to hire one Benzion Netanyahu. As Blum considers Netanyahu's case, he receives letters from various colleagues and associates of the candidate about the man and his scholarly work, which lead him to peruse Netanyahu's scholarship himself. This scholarship and these accounts—vastly varied as they are—illuminate the foibles, strengths, and contradictions (ranging from the minor and humorous to the significant and existential, and every combination in between) of a fascinating individual and, on Cohen's part, a richly imagined character. Netanyahu's foibles, strengths, and contradictions in turn illuminate the complexities of Jewish history and sociopolitics; the result is a wide-ranging, truly original novel that limns these topics from what feels like infinite angles. Cohen has taken on a hugely ambitious project, and if each element that his narrative explores—Jewish history, the history of Zionism, the history of antisemitism, the status of Jews in higher education, the conditions and results of Jewish American assimilation—is a proverbial stone, Cohen's project involves not just leaving no stone unturned, but also thoroughly inspecting each stone first. The result is a densely intellectual novel, and if it is at times pedantic, the pedantry is rarely unwarranted; it is simply a function of this conscientiousness. Formally, the novel's style is as energetic, expansive, and exploratory as its content; Cohen is an extraordinarily skilled writer, and his nearly manic prose is well suited to this ambitious and expansive, yet masterfully controlled, novel. If this sounds complex, that's because it is. But the complexity does not diminish the novel's readability; it is in no way a lightweight work, but it is a delightful and gratifying one.
A novel that is as enjoyable as it is intelligent: a truly brilliant book and a remarkable achievement.Pub Date: June 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68137-607-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
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
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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