REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD
It's 1776 and you are there on the ground with the Continental Army, watching His Excellency General George Washington clad in awesome "martial dignity" as he pulls his raw, undisciplined "rabble in arms" together. David McCullough brings this iconic year in our history to life in his new bestseller, 1776, and reads it to us himself. McCullough's gift for vibrant storytelling, based on in-depth research, is given full measure here. We meet the men who enlisted—Americans from widely different backgrounds and cultures, all familiar with adversity and hard work, who wore tattered clothes and lived in squalid encampments. And we meet Washington's deputies, Henry Knox and Nathaniel Greene, and his adversaries, General William Howe and King George III himself. What Washington did, what the army endured, is the stuff of legend, a legend now made real. This is McCullough at his masterful best.
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An Anglais in Paris
What happens when a nice young Brit is hired by a French firm to open a string of English tearooms in Paris? Sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it's really the beginning of A Year in the Merde, Stephen Clarke's rollicking romp through the intricacies of working, wooing and just ordering a cup of café au lait that doesn't come in a soup tureen and cost a fortune, performed with the right accents and style by Gerard Doyle, who adds that soupçon of je ne sais quoi. Paul West is trying his best to adjust to Parisian life, but his devastatingly loony French, his British work ethic and desire for the opposite sex keep getting in his way. Somehow, over the months he comes to grips with French hypocrisy (not unlike hypocrisy round the world), masters the French shrug, gets fired, gets a girl and gets on with it. Fun, whether you're a Francophile or -phobe.
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Moving on
Elizabeth Berg is a teller of tender, touching, grown-up tales, always tinged with humor and insight. The Year of Pleasures, her latest—narrated by Sandra Burr, whose distinctive voice and delivery suit perfectly here—is vintage Berg. Betta Nolan has just lost her beloved husband and, contrary to conventional wisdom, makes a major move from Boston to a small Midwestern town. Still wrapped in sorrow, Betta begins a new life, reaches out to old friends and comes to understand the comforts and pleasures of ordinary things. Berg doesn't shy away from the nitty-gritty of loneliness and, perhaps, the impossibility of ever finding the love and intense closeness that's been lost; yet she does offer hope, a hope so honest that the tug on your heartstrings begins to lighten.
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Sukey's favorite
Elmore Leonard's latest, The Hot Kid, is set in the 1930s: the Depression is raging, booze is verboten and desperadoes like Pretty Boy Floyd are dazzling the masses. Into this roiling stew of gangsters and gun molls, speakeasies and shootouts, comes cool, couth Carl Webster, a rising star in the Tulsa U.S. Marshals Service, whose calling card is "if I have to pull my weapon I'll shoot to kill," and who wants and gets more than his 15 minutes of fame. Though it's a departure in time and place, Elmore is in his element, the dialogue is perfect—as is Arliss Howard's gently twanging performance of it—and the supporting characters on the mark, including the curvy redhead Carl's nuts about, a wannabe big-time bank robber whose aim is fame, not gain, and a writer for "True Detective" whose intensely purple prose makes celebrities of them all. An A-plus for Elmore; nobody does it better.
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