One of the best of the current crop of historical novels, and a career-making march forward for Durham.
The Second Punic War of the third century b.c., which pitted the republic of Rome against the African empire of Carthage, is the rich subject of Durham’s latest.
As in its predecessors, Gabriel’s Story (2000) and Walk Through Darkness (2002), racial contrast and conflict bulk large—particularly in the heart and mind of Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca, who follows the example of his late father, Hamilcar, by waging ongoing war against a foe that has swallowed up innumerable lesser nations and tribes (“It is Rome’s actions I hate. It is the way Rome seeks to make slaves of all the world”). Durham’s sweeping narrative re-creates several years’ worth of crucial exploits, including Hannibal’s legendary passage through the Alps employing elephants as transport, major victories on a blood-soaked riverbank and at the pivotal battle of Cannae, strategic advances toward Rome through the territories of friendly (or conquered) peoples, and the climactic Roman triumph at Zama, conceived and led by young Roman general Publius Scipio, and followed by Hannibal’s return, emaciated and defeated, to an enfeebled Carthage. Durham has reimagined this vanished world in stunningly precise detail, and his lucid explanations of the give-and-take of military decision-making help the reader through some dauntingly complicated material. Nor is this novel merely a pageant: the author vividly portrays both Hannibal’s driven resolve and Scipio’s ruthless efficiency, as well as the conflicted emotions that rule several powerfully realized secondary figures. Among them are: Hannibal’s brothers and comrades-in-arms Hanno, Hasdrubal, and Mago; his gentle, stoical wife Imilce and stern, demanding older sister Sapanibal; Massyli (i.e., Numidian) prince Masinissa, impelled by his hopeless love for an unattainable woman to a perilous conflict of loyalties; and boyish Carthaginian soldier Imco Vaca, who finds his manhood on the battlefield, while losing the woman who (perhaps hopelessly) awaits his return, as the long story ends.
One of the best of the current crop of historical novels, and a career-making march forward for Durham.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-50603-1
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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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