A forceful attempt to plumb the heart of evil. Lourie, a novelist (Zero Gravity, 1987, etc.), translator, and the author of a series of nonfiction books on modern Russia, brings great knowledge to bear on this imagined record by Stalin. In straightforward prose, his Stalin traces with no hint of sentimentality his childhood, his clashes with a drunken, abusive father, his early hopes (quickly dashed) to be a poet, and his embrace of Bolshevism in prerevolutionary Russia as a likely path to power. Stalin is above all things shrewd, calculating, without hesitation. His wary relationship with the cunning Lenin, his ruthless attempts to ceaselessly gain more power and displace those others closer to Lenin, his clashes with the party intellectuals, whom he scorns, are all recounted in rapid-fire manner. Because Stalin is supposed to be setting down these memoirs in the ’40s, long after he’s gained power, his recollections of his long years in the underground, the coming of the revolution, and the early days of the Communist state are repeatedly interrupted by his obsessive musings on Leon Trotsky. Lourie’s Stalin is consumed by hatred and fear of Trotsky, the true revolutionary and a figure once seen as Lenin’s heir. Distrusting Trotsky’s principles, fearful of his influence, Stalin argues, again and again, his case against the exiled Trotsky, and plots to have him killed. Lourie catches, in the laconic tones of Stalin’s self-satisfied recollections, his pure ruthlessness; his absolute contempt for life; his furious need for power; his scorn for those willing to be led; his hatred of principles, and his exuberant nihilism (“I feel nothing because nothing is all there is to feel”). Gradually, without melodrama, Lourie creates a convincing portrait of a figure for whom, eventually, only absolute power could stave off terror. His version of Stalin’s warped soul subtly demonstrates how true evil is all too human in its origins.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-58243-004-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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