A debut thriller by U.S. News journalist (and former Berlin bureau chief) Marks, who takes us on a wild-goose chase through Eastern Europe during Communism’s last days. Most East Germans may have figured out by 1989 that Honecker’s jig was up, but Western observers—led by the intelligence agencies—remained blissfully unprepared for the storm that broke out that particular November. Army Intelligence officer Nester Cates, stationed in West Berlin, was more surprised than most: Taken aback when the Hungarians open their borders to the West, he is positively stupefied when the East Germans follow suit. It is hard for Cates to share in the general elation, you see, since his friend and fellow officer Stuart Glemmik has gone AWOL just hours before a freak accident(smelling of sabotage)kills a civilian technician at Cates’s post. Glemmik, by virtue of his disappearance, becomes the prime suspect, and Cates is given 24 hours to find him, or face the charges himself. How do you scare up an American who disappears into East Berlin on the precise day that all of East Berlin has gone West? Through your contacts, of course—and if you’re looking for Stuart Glemmik, then try his German girlfriend Uta Silk and his brother Douglas conveniently in town on Stuart’s invitation. Since they are as mystified as Cates by Stuart’s disappearance, the three team up to launch the most hopeless manhunt since Stanley went after Livingstone. Like all good thrillers, this one doesn’t stay in one place very long, and the investigation also gets played out against the elections in Prague and the assassinations in Bucharest. At the end, of course, Cates finds what everyone else discovered at the close of 1989: a new world. Unremarkable as a story, but with good touches of local color. Cold War buffs and glÑsnost groupies will go for it; others may feel left out in the cold.
Pub Date: Sept. 8, 1998
ISBN: 1-57322-122-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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