bookpagedev

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Okay, so there are sharks. And reconstituted dinosaurs. Unfriendly nuclear powers and hostile aliens and berserk asteroids. But the flu? Somehow, as a serious threat to the well-being of the world population, getting the flu has rated pretty low on my list of terminal things to worry about. Not any more. The flu in question, of course, is the Spanish Lady, the horrendous version of influenza that precipitated the most lethal medical event in history and killed more people after World War I than the war itself. The First Horseman, a potential nightmare encased in fiction, proceeds on the theory that, under certain circumstances, that flu bug could kill every unimmunized person on earth. And, luckily for readers, if not the world, there are three bodies buried in the Siberian permafrost from which the deadly virus can be recreated. After a good deal of hop, skip, and jumping around between places and persons, the story settles down to watch as the bad guys/girls, members of an off-the-wall religious cult led by a charismatic madman, work to preserve the endangered natural world by simply destroying that inconvenient scourge, all human life. Of course, the good guys/girls labor to foil them, taking considerable physical mistreatment as well as falling in love in their spare time. It’s the perfect scenario for the next big movie thriller, although filmmakers may find it difficult to express the apparent expertise displayed by the author about both government and medical processes.

The first horseman reference touches on the famous four horsemen of the New Testament Apocalypse. But you knew that, of course. Whether or not he was originally identified with the spread of pestilence, (the Book of Revelation is not clear on that point), the apocalyptic connection indicates nasty consequences for an unknowing world. John Case, who wrote the bestseller The Genesis Code, is a pseudonymous award-winning investigative reporter in Washington, D.

C. He plants a mischievous hint at the end of the story that may make readers think twice about its status as fiction, but I am hopeful we can dismiss this as creative inspiration. It’s bad enough, really, to know there are Charles Manson and David Koresh types out there who, like Solange in this book, seem to magnetically attract their disciples’ loyalty through sadistic and abusive practices. The author effectively builds the reservoir of dread that fuels all good thrillers as he portrays the twisted mind at work turning ordinary people into amoral uncaring monsters.

The world survives, but, every time the flu bug goes around from now on (especially in April or May), those of us who have read The First Horseman will not feel entirely secure until the symptoms subside. Maude McDaniel is a freelance writer in Cumberland, MD.

Okay, so there are sharks. And reconstituted dinosaurs. Unfriendly nuclear powers and hostile aliens and berserk asteroids. But the flu? Somehow, as a serious threat to the well-being of the world population, getting the flu has rated pretty low on my list of terminal things…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Paul Evans, the best-selling author of the phenomenally successful The Christmas Box trilogy, has created yet another masterpiece. The Looking Glass, Evans’s seventh book, is poised to join the runaway success of his past work.

Set in the town of Bethel, Utah, during the pioneering days of the late 1800s, The Looking Glass is the fascinating love story of Hunter Bell and Quaye MacGandley and the struggles they undergo on the way to finding that love.

Bell, a former Presbyterian minister-turned-gambler, has spent most of his adult life running; he ran from his ministry to escape the never-ceasing memory of his wife’s tragic death and the young daughter he had to leave behind in Pennsylvania. Once a refugee from frontier justice, Bell is seemingly content to live out a solitary life in the rugged mountains above Bethel. Until, that is, during a blinding blizzard, he rescues a beautiful Irish maiden who turns his empty world upside-down.

As a young woman, Quaye MacGandley was sold into marital slavery during the Irish potato famine and brought to America against her will, finally ending up in Bethel. Abused and thrown out into a raging Utah snowstorm by her brutal husband, Quaye struggles to escape this tragic life.

Surrounded by a hungry pack of wolves, she is mercifully rescued by Hunter Bell, who nurses her back to health. His tender ministrations help to heal her wounds, but can they heal her broken heart? And, in turn, can Hunter open his heart to his own greatest fear: that he might love again? This beautiful tale of Hunter and Quaye is an inspiring, heartwarming story of how two wounded people help restore each other through the unending power of love and understanding. Written in short, simple chapters, Richard Evans skillfully creates yet another memorable cast of endearing characters who will touch lives worldwide.

A consummate storyteller, Evans’s work reflects a message of hope, love, and faith. Truly magical in content, The Looking Glass will delight and entertain new readers, and inspire and encourage Evans’s established legions of loyal fans. ¦ Sharon Galligar Chance is a book reviewer from Wichita Falls, Texas.

Paul Evans, the best-selling author of the phenomenally successful The Christmas Box trilogy, has created yet another masterpiece. The Looking Glass, Evans's seventh book, is poised to join the runaway success of his past work.

Set in the town of Bethel, Utah,…

Fiction

A book to savor and ponder

Review by bookpagedev

It is the summer of 1998, and while the Clinton/Lewinsky affair is smeared across the headlines, a more intriguing scandal is unfolding in a small New England college town. Coleman Silk, dean of Athena College, has been forced to retire because of spurious charges of racism. When his wife has a heart attack, Silk rails against his accusers for causing her death. In an act of emotional rehabilitation, he then initiates an affair with a much younger, illiterate woman, and once again is castigated by the sanctimonious community.

This is the scenario around which Philip Roth masterfully constructs his new novel, The Human Stain. But while a less experienced (or less talented) novelist might have felt that unraveling the events and consequences of the scandal were enough, Roth has a lot more on his mind. He pulls an unexpected ace from his sleeve about a quarter of the way through the book, letting readers in on a startling secret. The truth about Coleman Silk, which not even his wife knew, throws an ironic light on the charges of racism, and in one stroke pushes the story beyond a mere indictment of a witch hunt. With the turn of a page, the book becomes a study in the price of personal pride, a powerful statement about racism and identity in America, and a tragedy that transcends the personal and stains us all.

The Human Stain is the final book in a loosely connected trilogy of novels about postwar America that Roth has produced over the last four years. The first book of the group, American Pastoral, won the Pulitzer Prize; the second was I Married a Communist. These recent novels are clearly the work of an older writer wrestling with large issues, and though they lack the quirky humor that established Roth as a popular writer back in the ’60s, they stretch his literary achievement in directions one might not have imagined, back when Portnoy’s Complaint was causing a small scandal of its own.

A book both to savor and to ponder, The Human Stain will speak to anyone who has watched with bafflement as civility and geniality have been systematically drained from our cultural dialogue.

It is the summer of 1998, and while the Clinton/Lewinsky affair is smeared across the headlines, a more intriguing scandal is unfolding in a small New England college town. Coleman Silk, dean of Athena College, has been forced to retire because of spurious charges of…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Good novels provide settings that are more than ancillary. Distinctive locales become added characters. In Blue Moon, John Leslie’s fourth Key West-based Gideon Lowry mystery, a bluesy, island mood pervades. Leslie creates ambiance that blends a wistful, laid-back existence with the hurry-up veneer of a tourist mecca. This transformation, from ocean breeze-swept outpost to a hustling, high- dollar, real estate boomtown, brings financial pressures and transient visitors, and the dangers borne by each. Leslie captures the camaraderie of longtime residents, and the challenges they face: the intoxication of attractive strangers, and new, sometimes illicit sources of income. Private investigator Gideon Lowry is a part-time piano lounge entertainer. He’s also a Conch, a Key West native who bemoans his lost days of youth, the funkiness of a carefree, tropical life. He also regrets losing the love of restaurant owner Gabriella Gaby Wade. So when Gaby asks that Gideon do a background check on her new fiancŽ, widower and newcomer Roy Emerson, Lowry approaches the task with mixed emotions. Gaby describes Emerson as a man who puts deals together. Lowry would love to find a flaw in his character.

Lowry has other problems and opinions. The elderly owners of the mom-and-pop Cuban grocery next to his Duval Street office and apartment are being pressured to sell out. Fred Pacey, a developer with a 20 year history of ignoring tradition in favor of homogenized facades, wants to construct a central shopping mall for tourists. Lowry, too, has received offers. Positioning himself as a stalwart holdout, Gideon advises his neighbors not to sell out and ruin their way of life. Secretly, he wonders if it isn’t time to take the money and abandon the downtown rat race. Lowry’s initial queries into Emerson’s lifestyle connect the man with developer Pacey. Then, late one night, arson destroys the grocery. Gideon feels guilt over his bad advice, and his suspicions regarding the tropical terrorism are founded upon no solid facts. Soon Lowry is breaking all the rules: working on his own nickel, and trying to solve two simultaneous cases that may not exist. He walks the tightrope between rescuing his ex-lover from a danger that only he perceives, and his nightmare, destroying the friendship for good.

Advice from a Jackson Hole, Wyoming investigator (where Emerson’s wife died in a climbing accident), and help from old acquaintances, Detectives Dave Robicheaux in Louisiana and Hoke Moseley in Miami, prompt Lowry to stage an ill-advised ploy to expose the past and rescue the future. Throughout Blue Moon, Lowry runs on knowledge and instinct, but his feel for the turf, the unique island nuances and politics, mold his judgment and actions. He gambles friendship, takes risks. John Leslie’s version of the false carefree life in the Keys grips the reader and deepens suspense. Gideon may be left standing alone, staring at the cold, blue moon, but readers will appreciate the depth of this fourth book in the Lowry series.

Tom Corcoran is a writer in Florida. His first novel, The Mango Opera, was released by St. Martin’s Press in June.

Good novels provide settings that are more than ancillary. Distinctive locales become added characters. In Blue Moon, John Leslie's fourth Key West-based Gideon Lowry mystery, a bluesy, island mood pervades. Leslie creates ambiance that blends a wistful, laid-back existence with the hurry-up veneer of a…

History

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Between 1929 and 1945 the American people and their political leadership met and emerged victorious over two daunting challenges. Had events gone in other directions, our century could have been quite different. In a brilliant narrative history of broad scope and complexity, Stanford University historian David M. Kennedy recreates that crucial period in Freedom from Fear. The latest volume in the publisher’s award-winning Oxford History of the American People, it encompasses political, economic, diplomatic, social, and military history.

Kennedy examines in detail the root causes that contributed to the crises, placing them in context with events elsewhere in the world. Chief among these is the terms of the Versailles Treaty after World War I, which imposed harsh reparations on Germany, brought serious economic problems to that country, and eventually raised Hitler to power. The author shows that in the United States, the economic prosperity of the 1920s did not reach all citizens, with farmers and minority groups especially left out. What did FDR hope to accomplish with his New Deal? We are going to make a country, he told Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, in which no one is left out. The pattern of institutional arrangements that came out of that period, according to Kennedy, can be summarized in one word: security security for vulnerable individuals, to be sure . . . but security for capitalists and consumers, for workers and employers, for corporations and farms and homeowners and bankers as well. The historian also notes: . . . legend to the contrary, much of the security that the New Deal threaded into the fabric of American society was often stitched with a remarkably delicate hand, not simply imposed by the fist of the imperious state. Kennedy devotes considerable attention to American involvement in World War II, focusing not only on military personnel and major battles but also on those who served on the home front. In these chapters, as throughout the entire volume, there is concern for the effect of events on individuals. The tremendous popularity of Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation has shown the widespread interest in and appreciation of what Americans did in that period. There could not be a better companion volume than this one.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

Between 1929 and 1945 the American people and their political leadership met and emerged victorious over two daunting challenges. Had events gone in other directions, our century could have been quite different. In a brilliant narrative history of broad scope and complexity, Stanford University historian…

FictionWomen's Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

The Wholeness of a Broken Heart is the kind of book that makes you want to curl up and be left in solitude so that you can become fully immersed in the lives of its inhabitants. The story is told in the words of four generations of Jewish women, from the great-grandmother Channa, born in Koretz, Poland, in 1880, to the great-granddaughter Hannah, for whom she is named, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in l989. Although the story focuses on particular generations of Jewish mothers and daughters, it transcends these cultural boundaries to include women’s relationships in all cultures.

The story centers around Hannah and her relationship with her mother, which was intensely intimate until a casual comment catapulted them into irreparable separation. Hannah struggles with this loss, relying on the comfort and insight of her grandmother to help her survive. As we go back and forth through time, we discover the secrets and events that make this family of women both weak and strong, passive and domineering, depressed and joyful.

The stories involve you in the ties that bind these women together and the struggles that drive them apart. Katie Singer’s style is engaging, and the tales are colorfully laced with the Yiddish language, which makes for a poignant expression of the lessons and emotions that are passed down through the generations. These Yiddish expressions create a special intimacy not typically found in modern life, where we so often lack the right words to convey our feelings. The title itself comes from an old Yiddish proverb, Es is nitto a gantsere zach vi ah tsiprochene harts, There’s nothing more whole than a broken heart. This book, however, makes one’s heart full with the knowledge that love and family, while often the cause of much heartache, are ultimately the very things that make us whole again. Lorraine Rose is a writer and psychotherapist in Washington, D.

C.

The Wholeness of a Broken Heart is the kind of book that makes you want to curl up and be left in solitude so that you can become fully immersed in the lives of its inhabitants. The story is told in the words of four…

Nonfiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Of mice and men Editor’s note: Each month we see lots of books. Some of the curious arrivals are featured in this space.

The dark. War. Tornadoes. All are common fears experienced by both young and old. But what about ski wax? Pumpkin carving? Daytime? If you’re running out of things to fear since the fall of the Iron Curtain, fear no more . . . well, until you pick up a copy of Melinda Muse’s latest book I’m Afraid You’re Afraid: 448 Things to Fear and Why. Alphabetically, Muse lists people, places, events, activities, and objects and why there is cause for alarm. Be prepared for a whole new crop of urban legends to erupt based (right or wrong) on many of Muse’s findings. Fraidy-cats, lily-livereds, and spineless wimps can now rejoice, for this book gives them the power to say, See? I told you so! Miriam Drennan (mouse and proud of it)

Of mice and men Editor's note: Each month we see lots of books. Some of the curious arrivals are featured in this space.

The dark. War. Tornadoes. All are common fears experienced by both young and old. But what about ski wax? Pumpkin…
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Bloodstream is a deliciously frightening story guaranteed to send chills up your spine an added bonus this time of year.

Newly widowed Dr. Claire Elliot has left a successful career in Baltimore to move with her son, Noah, to the small resort town of Tranquillity, Maine. After the death of his father, Noah had fallen in with bad company and run afoul of the law. Claire had decided that a move to Tranquillity would make for a fresh start for both mother and son.

However, Noah is unhappy in school, struggling to fit in among students who have known each other since birth. And Claire is beginning to have her own doubts about the move as it becomes apparent that the locals are more than a little suspicious of the big city doctor who has taken over the practice of their longtime and beloved physician. Tranquillity it seems, is anything but for Claire and her son.

Then the violence begins. One of Claire’s teenage patients opens fire in his high school biology class, killing the teacher and wounding several students. His parents blame Claire for taking him off a medication prescribed by his former physician, but Claire is certain that something else led the boy to commit such a terrible and unexpected act. When she tries to order a blood test for drugs, Claire is abruptly dismissed as the boy’s doctor.

As the violence escalates quiet children are suddenly given to vicious outbursts, cruelty to animals, then another inexplicable murder Claire desperately searches for a cause. Amid wild rumors of Satanic cults and local witches, she considers everything from illegal drugs to the small blue mushrooms that grow in the woods and are sometimes eaten by Tranquillity’s teens. And what about the strange phosphorescent green glow that Claire and Lincoln Kelly, the local sheriff, see coming from the local lake? Then Claire discovers what many of the local already know this isn’t the first time that seemingly normal teenagers have committed unspeakable acts of violence in Tranquillity. There were murders in 1887 and again almost 50 years ago. Warren Emerson, one of the murderous teens from five decades ago, still lives in Tranquillity. Cast out from the community, he lives in virtual isolation in the woods with only a cat and his memories for companionship. Could Warren, wonders Claire, hold the key to what’s happening to Tranquillity’s children? Gerritsen, whose two previous medical thrillers, Harvest and Life Support terrorized their way onto bestseller lists, looks to have done it again Bloodstream is best read with the lights on and the doors securely locked.

Lucinda Dyer is a publicist and freelance writer in Franklin, Tennessee.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Bloodstream is a deliciously frightening story guaranteed to send chills up your spine an added bonus this time of year.

Newly widowed Dr. Claire Elliot has left a successful career in Baltimore to move with her son,…

MusicArts & Culture

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Now approaching its 74th anniversary, the Grand Ole Opry is more than just America’s longest-running radio show. It is also a cultural force of limitless reverberations, one whose impact far surpasses that of any of its biggest stars whether of Roy Acuff, its first musical titan, or Garth Brooks, its current behemoth.

No scholar is better suited to reveal the Grand Ole Opry’s historic underpinnings than Charles K. Wolfe. He has written extensively on the subject before and has contributed valuable studies of such country music luminaries as Kitty Wells, Grandpa Jones, the Louvin Brothers, and DeFord Bailey, the Opry’s first major black personality. A tireless interviewer of peripheral figures and a rooter-out of obscure archives, Wolfe’s most recent offering was The Devil’s Box: Masters of Southern Fiddling.

In his new book, Wolfe chronicles the Opry from its advent November 28, 1925, on Nashville radio station WSM as a regional barn dance to its development into a cherished national institution by 1940. He explains as well how the Opry cast evolved in its first 15 years from a loose collection of musically talented amateurs into a corps of polished show business professionals. At the center of all this activity stood the Opry’s originator and guiding spirit, station manager George D. Hay, the solemn old judge. Wolfe’s research turns up a number of notable firsts. By his account, the Binkley Brothers and Jack Jackson’s I’ll Rise When the Rooster Crows, recorded in 1928, was the first country hit to come from Nashville. Obed Dad Pickard, who made his Opry debut in 1926, became the show’s first vocal star. And the Vagabonds, who came to the Opry in 1931, are credited with creating its first souvenir songbook and establishing Nashville’s first country music publishing company. A segment of the Opry first began airing regularly on the NBC radio network in October, 1939. Wolfe also points out that in spite of the Opry’s growing importance Nashville did not become a country music recording center until the mid-1940s. Although many of the Opry’s early performers made records, they did so in such faraway places as Atlanta and New York.

This fact-filled text is enriched by 46 photos and a complete annotated listing of the Opry’s cast members from 1925 to 1940. It bears emphasizing that Wolfe is as readable as he is detailed.

Edward Morris is a Nashville-based journalist and former country music editor of Billboard.

Now approaching its 74th anniversary, the Grand Ole Opry is more than just America's longest-running radio show. It is also a cultural force of limitless reverberations, one whose impact far surpasses that of any of its biggest stars whether of Roy Acuff, its first musical…

Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Our Fathers is a dense, literate novel set in Scotland. This comes as no surprise since its author, Andrew O’Hagan, is himself a Scotsman and was named Scottish Writer of the Year in 1998.

James Bawn is the narrator, a 35-year-old man traveling from Liverpool to see his dying grandfather in Ayrshire county. Though his father was an angry, abusive alcoholic, his father’s father was a successful socialist politician whose grand vision and equally grand speaking voice made high-rise apartment buildings a postwar seaside reality. Granda was a priest of steel decking and concrete. But now the buildings are being demolished, and the old man also suffers decline. He rails at everyone who will listen, and often on the balcony to those who don’t. Granda always wanted the world to hear him. This book gives voice to Granda, towering over his son and grandson, as the buildings he saw erected towered over the village’s past.

James credits his current life to having had a childhood which was dotted with lucky islands, chief among them being his mother, his books, and his grandparents.

Of his mother, he writes of meeting her frequently after her morning shift in the bakery to share fresh baked buns, a respite from anger in the house.

James retreated into books, only to be told by his screaming father that books were only good for boring bastards who don’t know how to enjoy themselves. His grandparents, to whom he fled when he could no longer endure his father’s alcoholic rages, gave him room to live. They also gave him stories of the family’s past, including that of his grandfather’s mother, who led rent-strikers during World War I in a battle against slumlords.

O’Hagan is a lyrical writer, whose poetic turn of phrase creates an unforgettable image with a minimum of words.

Our fathers were made for grief. And all our lives we waited for sadness to happen . . . We had only the prospect of living in their wake . . . O’Hagan speaks for many of us as he concludes, Maybe there is no such thing as an ordinary trip home. ¦ George Cowmeadow Bauman is the co-owner of Acorn Books in Columbus, Ohio.

Our Fathers is a dense, literate novel set in Scotland. This comes as no surprise since its author, Andrew O'Hagan, is himself a Scotsman and was named Scottish Writer of the Year in 1998.

James Bawn is the narrator, a 35-year-old man…

FictionWorld Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

His literary arrival already hailed by the likes of Salman Rushdie and John Updike, Ardashir Vakil has a reputation to live up to with this, his very first novel. Rushdie, who knows an authentic voice when he hears one, has excerpted Beach Boy in his new anthology of the most brilliant Indian writing of the past 50 years since his and Vakil’s native country gained independence in 1948. Both writers now live in London, but both are still emotionally immersed in the life of India’s most populous and varied city. They continue to live and breathe Bombay.

Beach Boy is in the classic mode of the coming-of-age story. Its hero is only a bit younger than usual a very precocious, even highly sexed eight-year-old. Cyrus Readymoney belongs to Bombay’s privileged Parsi class, those adherents to Zoroastrianism who have been largely Westernized. He feels no guilt about his family’s wealth in a city of grinding poverty, and his closest adult friend is a holdover from the Imperial regime, an eccentric and brilliantly evoked maharani. Rather neglected by his social (and adulterous) parents, Cyrus wanders all over Bombay, usually in search of Hindi and Hollywood cinema. He even pretends, with some success, to be an Indian child film star. His fantasy life injects both humor and pathos in Vakil’s portrait.

Set in the early ’70s, the novel is clearly autobiographical. Even if Vakil’s own adolescence didn’t so closely parallel Cyrus’s, the luxurious sensory detail of the story would reveal the author’s teeming memory of the sights, sounds, and, most of all, tastes of his setting. Cyrus loves to eat, and one of the richest pleasures of the book is in vicarious feasting. Wherever our young voyeur goes, he’s sure to find food and, with few exceptions, sure to relish it.

A bit of a thief and a rogue, an eavesdropper and a liar, Cyrus is reminiscent of Truffaut’s hero in The 400 Blows. Like Truffaut, Vakil lets the story unfold through character and incident, not formal plot. And the characters are vivid and unique from Cyrus’s love interest (the adopted daughter of the maharani) to his imperious Aunt Zenobia and his neighbor Mr. Krishnan, a thundering but lovable Communist. The boy’s immediate family only gradually come into focus, however, and for good reason. By the end of the novel, great sorrow will come to the Readymoneys, and Cyrus will confront a harsher world. With Arundhati Roy’s best-selling The God of Small Things and Vikram Chandra’s wonderful Love and Longing in Bombay, Indian literature seems to be entering a golden age. Beach Boy has been touched by Midas too, and Ardashir Vakil is on the threshold of what could be a gilded career.

His literary arrival already hailed by the likes of Salman Rushdie and John Updike, Ardashir Vakil has a reputation to live up to with this, his very first novel. Rushdie, who knows an authentic voice when he hears one, has excerpted Beach Boy in his…

Memoir

A fascinating book on the book biz

Review by bookpagedev

Michael Korda has been at the heart of the book business both as an editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster and as a best-selling author. For over 40 years he has been on the inside of American publishing, from the time when it was perceived as a gentleman’s occupation through the show-business-driven ’90s, from the time when editors were the premier decision-makers to today’s accountant-dominated industry. Max Schuster once told Korda, This is commerce, you see, as well as culture.

Although Another Life is written as a memoir, Korda’s emphasis is on the people he’s worked with over the years. Presidents and royalty, great writers and unknowns have all benefited from Korda’s editing. And we benefit by Korda having such a good memory and a talent for storytelling. From the ’60s to the ’90s, Korda documents the publishing approach to creating bestsellers, finally concluding, "The celebrity autobiography was well suited to the growing symbiosis between books and television. Give the reader a break, was Dick Simon’s dictate to every editor at Simon and Schuster."

Korda applied this wisdom to the books he edited, but also to this book he’s written for us now. The stories flow. He drops celebrity, publishing, and writers’ names as we would those in our own office, for his office really did see all those noted people. His anecdotes convey both the positive and the less-than-sterling behavior of those he worked with. He also offers lots of book trivia, including the tidbit that Catch-22 was originally titled "Catch-18," until it was discovered that the new novel from Leon Uris was called Mila-18.

This is a fun and fascinating look into the business that generates all those books we read.

George Cowmeadow Bauman is the co-owner of Acorn Bookshop in Columbus, Ohio.

Michael Korda has been at the heart of the book business both as an editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster and as a best-selling author. For over 40 years he has been on the inside of American publishing, from the time when it was perceived as…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Hitler’s Niece, by National Book Award Finalist Ron Hansen, is troubling for the reader. On the one hand, the reader wants to hang on to the perception of Hitler as the archvillain of the 20th century; on the other hand, Hansen’s portrayal is of a driven, inhibited, humorous, insecure, and therefore very human, man. Not sympathetic, mind you, but human. Viewed through the eyes of his beloved niece Angelika (Geli), Hitler is portrayed in this fictional work over an 18-year period from 1913-1931. The narration starts with his school days, continues through his internment in the Landsberg Fortress on charges of treason, touches on the writing of Mein Kampf, and draws to a close with his consolidation of power with the Nazi party. At this point, Hitler was little known outside Germany, a situation that was to change dramatically over the next few years.

Geli was the apfel of Hitler’s eye, from the time she was a tiny child until she grew into full-bodied fraulein-hood. Over the years, however, the direction of his attentions went hopelessly awry. Although maintaining an avuncular facade, Hitler developed an infatuation for his niece that was at once unhealthy and unrequited. Geli was entranced with the man’s oracular abilities, and his free and easy way of spending money on her, but her heart belonged to Hitler’s friend and chauffeur, Emil Maurice. And still Hitler’s obsession grew.

Hitler’s Niece is based largely on fact. Hansen painstakingly researched and carefully pieced together Hitler’s and Geli’s whereabouts for the narrative. Actual quotations from Hitler’s speeches pepper the text. And through it all, Hansen effectively captures the desperation of a man ravenous for love and power in equal measure, a man on the road to becoming a monster, the likes of which the modern world had never known. ¦ Bruce Tierney is a writer and songwriter.

Hitler's Niece, by National Book Award Finalist Ron Hansen, is troubling for the reader. On the one hand, the reader wants to hang on to the perception of Hitler as the archvillain of the 20th century; on the other hand, Hansen's portrayal is of a…

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