A well-researched Civil War drama, highly informative about cotton’s importance to both sides.
A Civil War novel traces a wealthy plantation owner’s fight to protect his family’s lands as the North extends its blockade to Georgia’s outer islands and ports.
In May 1861, Randolph Spalding figures that it is just a matter of time before the Union blockade of Southern ports hits his cotton business. Union troops would likely occupy his beloved Sapelo Island in Georgia and confiscate his cotton to feed the “Insatiable English and Northern textile mills” that “craved all the cotton the South could produce.” Randolph, like his father, Thomas, before him, seeks to dissuade the Georgia legislature from joining the other Southern states in the Secession. But his pleading is ignored. A shortage of “competent military officers” causes Georgia Gov. Joseph E. Brown to appoint “prominent men to lead their local militias.” Randolph is commissioned as a colonel and ordered to report to Brig. Gen. Alexander Lawton, the commander of Georgia’s coastal defenses based in Savannah, because his knowledge of the waterways in and around Sapelo Island is considered invaluable. Brown’s narrative centers on the real-life Spalding family, powerful plantation owners in Georgia during the Civil War era, and lays bare the complex questions surrounding slavery, issues that still reverberate in today’s political discourse. His focus on the home-front experiences rather than the actions on the battlefields captures the conviction of the plantation class that the war was about states’ rights, not slavery. Upon hearing the song “The Bonnie Blue Flag…Hurrah! Hurrah! for Southern Rights,” Randolph proclaims: “We just want to preserve our god given rights” to self-determination. Brown is an able wordsmith. His precise descriptions of period dress and culture as well as his use of racial slurs in the dialogue are evocative of the time and place. While light on tension, the novel skillfully underscores the economic importance of cotton to both the North and South. When Lawton suggests that the North has enough troops to just disrupt the South’s ports, Randolph argues that President Abraham Lincoln needs cotton for the North’s mills and will go on the offensive to secure it.
A well-researched Civil War drama, highly informative about cotton’s importance to both sides.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9798888240441
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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