FullReviews Index - page 2
On Agate Hill
On her thirteenth birthday, Molly, an orphaned daughter of a Confederate soldier, writes in her diary "I know I am a spitfire and a burden. I do not care. For evil or good this is my own true life and I WILL have it. I will." Molly keeps her diary amidst her "box of phenomena," containing "letters, poems, songs, court records, marbles, rocks, dolls, and bones, some human," and it is through the precocious orphan's writing that Lee Smith artfully reveals her life On Agate Hill.
Thirteen Moons
Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain was a huge success - a National Book Award winner that was made into a blockbuster movie. Readers have waited a decade for Frazier's second novel, and it is finally here. In Thirteen Moons, an historical fiction set in the mid-19th century, protagonist Will Cooper recalls his adventures amidst the Cherokee at a Smoky Mountain trading post.
The Interpretation of Murder
Inspired by Sigmund Freud's only visit to America, The Interpretation of Murder is an intricate tale of murder and the mind's most dangerous mysteries. It unfurls on a sweltering August evening in 1909 as Freud disembarks from the steamship George Washington, accompanied by Carl Jung, his rival and protégé. Across town, in an opulent apartment high above the city, a stunning young woman is found dangling from a chandelier—whipped, mutilated, and strangled.
Beware the Wolves
Beware the Wolves, A Soviet WWII Story by Victor Moss follows two young lovers through the horrors of the war-torn Soviet Union. It focuses on Captain Vladmir Moskalkov, a doctor recruited to practice medicine at the western front, and his young wife Vladyslava (Slava) as they struggle to survive German invasion and occupation. Seperated by the war, they must find one another against incredible odds and suffer atrocities that can turn men into animals.
Empress
In seventh-century China, during the great Tang dynasty, a young girl from the humble Wu clan entered the imperial gynaecium, which housed ten thousand concubines. Inside the Forbidden City, she witnessed seductions, plots, murders, and brazen acts of treason. Propelled by a shrewd intelligence, an extraordinary persistence, and a friendship with the imperial heir, she rose through the ranks to become the first Empress of China.
Telegraph Days
Telegraph Days is a delightful bagatelle of a novel. "Bagatelle" is used in the sense of a short, light piece of work. It is a most enjoyable read, and turns the stereotype of Western women on its head. In doing so, it likely portrays a more accurate picture of the toughness of the women who helped settle the West. The list of historical persons who weave in and out of her life is extensive. McMurtry captures their characters succinctly but with admirable accuracy.
Back to Wando Passo
In Back to Wando Passo, David Payne captures the essence of two distinct eras in the South, imbuing them with so much reality that we need a fan for the heat and passion of the place and a swatter for the mosquitoes. He brings all this together in an ethereal miasma of vividly remembered stories.
The Madonnas of Leningrad
Moving back and forth in time between the Soviet Union and contemporary America, The Madonnas of Leningrad is a portrait of war and remembrance, of the power of love, memory, and art to offer beauty, grace, and hope in the face of overwhelming despair.
The Book Thief
Set during World War II in Germany, Markus Zusak's new novel is the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster girl living outside of Munich. Liesel scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can't resist-books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement before he is marched to Dachau.
Europe Central
Seven hundred fifty pages long, with an additional fifty pages of notes, William T. Vollman's Europe Central is dense with allusions to art, to music, to literature, and to history. Its characters include Kurt Gerstein, Käthe Kollwitz, and generals on both sides of the Eastern front in the Second World War; Vollmann's psychological portrayals of these individuals are both plausible and intense.
The Widow of the South
In an extraordinary debut novel, based on a remarkable true story, Robert Hicks draws an unforgettable, panoramic portrait of a woman who, through love and loss, found a cause. Known throughout the country as "the Widow of the South," Carrie McGavock gave her heart first to a stranger, then to a tract of hallowed ground-and became a symbol of a nation's soul. The Widow of the South captures the vast madness of wa, and the courage of a remarkable woman to claim life from death itself.
The March
In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army pillaged the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, and demolished cities. E.L. Doctorow powerfully and compassionately renders the lives of those who marched in The March.
I, Fatty
Framed for a crime he didn't commit, Fatty Arbuckle was the first modern celebrity whose presumed guilt - and alleged innocence - galvanized a nation. In "I, Fatty" Jerry Stahl, the author of Permanent Midnight, tells the story from Fatty's own perspective. This is a portrait of a comic genius whose rise and fall set the precedent for the scandals that still shake Hollywood today.
The Historian
A woman finds an ancient book that take her down a path of inquiry trod by her father years before. It is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler of Wallachia, present day Romania, whose gruesome reign Bram Stoker based his legend of Dracula upon. What lies at the heart of the connection between the historical Vlad and the mythical vampire? Elizabeth Kostova's "The Historian" takes the reader into a web of historical inquiry that leads forebodingly towards the answer.
A Star Called Henry / Oh, Play That Thing
With his sharp-edged wit, Roddy Doyle introduces Henry Smart--adventurer, IRA assassin, and lover. At once an epic and a prophetic portrait of Irish history, both past and present, A Star Called Henry is a tour de force. In Oh, Play That Thing, Henry makes his way across America, teeming with surprises. It is both a saga unto itself—full of epic adventures, and a magnificent follow-up to A Star Called Henry.
Havoc in Its Third Year
A penetrating and ambitious historical novel, Havoc, in Its Third Year by Ronan Bennett is an ingenious, often deeply unnerving narrative of seventeenth-century England that speaks directly to the fanaticism and fears of today. Shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize, "Havoc in Its Third Year" is full of finely drawn characters and subtley crafted contemporary commentary.
Arrogance
In Joanna Scott's breakthrough novel the Austrian artist Egon Schiele comes to prismatic life in a narrative that defies convention, history, and identity. A self-professed genius and student of August Klimt, Scott's Schiele repeatedly challenges the boundaries of early twentieth-century Europe. Told from a crosscurrent of voices, viewpoints and times, this stunning novel won Scott a nomination for the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award.
Isle of Canes
Elizabeth Shown Mills, author of is an acclaimed genealogist, and "Isle of Canes" is her first novel. During her career, she served as president of the American Society of Genealogists and recently retired as editor of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. The focus of her research was the people who lived on the "island" between the Cane and Red Rivers near Natchitoches, Louisiana. Mills brings a sense of passion and respect for the families to this "faction," fact told through fiction.
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