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Guest Book Review: The Works of Jeff Shaara
Welcome to the second entry in the guest reviews series I’m hosting. Please give your warmest attention to my guest, Jim Peterson!
Meet the Guest:
My name is Jim Peterson, and I’m the Technology Coordinator for the Goodnight Memorial Library in Franklin, KY. I wear two big hats here – both Technical Services Librarian & IT department. I manage the library’s website, fix, build, break (sometimes) and maintain all the computers, servers & network devices. I spend a lot of time in front of a computer screen most days. In my down time, I like to do vegetable gardening, landscaping, camp, hunt, fish – you know, all those good ole boy activities – as well as do customization work on my vehicles.
Summary:
The works of Jeff Shaara are of historical fiction. What is unique about his books is that they are a chronological account of important periods in American history, as seen through the eyes of those who lived them. Characters are developed from much research, using personal letters, letters from loved ones, diary entries and written records from the periods. The Shaara works give you a true sense of what this country’s forefathers were thinking and feeling, absorbing you into the story as though you were standing right beside them. You hear the cracks of the rifles, the blasts of the canons, and the fiery, passionate rhetoric.
Review:
I am going to write about the works of Jeff Shaara, son of Michael Shaara. I feel that I can’t do the author justice without giving a little background on his father, who only published one book that was widely recognized. Michael’s book, The Killer Angels, was rejected by the first 15 publishers who saw the manuscript. It was eventually published in 1973 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. Michael suffered a fatal heart attack in 1988 and never saw the legacy of his work come full circle. Some 19 years after it was published, the film Gettysburg (1993) was based on Killer Angels, and propelled the book to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List. Son Jeff rediscovered the manuscript of a baseball story, For Love of the Game, which was released in 1999 as a major motion picture starring Kevin Costner and Kelly Preston.
Jeff Shaara picked up the mantle of his father, Michael Shaara, in turning out great historical fiction after his father passed away in 1988. Jeff continued the story of the Civil War in writing Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure, both of which were well-received with Gods and Generals winning the 1996 ALA William Young Boyd Award and being used as the basis for the motion picture Gods and Generals.
Jeff has also gone back in time, starting with the American Revolution and chronicling the travels and events surrounding Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, John Hancock, and all the founding fathers of our country. In Rise to Rebellion and The Glorious Cause, you feel the suffering of the men at Valley Forge, and the frustration of George Washington as he tries to assemble and lead an army. You learn that Benjamin Franklin was quite eccentric, even by today’s standards. You feel the arrogance of the British through the eyes of Generals Gage and Cornwallis, as well as the weight of the defeats on both sides.
Jeff Shaara has also remembered to re-educate us on the wars that our own history books touch on only slightly. In Gone for Soldiers, we learn of the dominance of Winfield Scott and the rise of soldiers Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and Andrew Jackson. We feel the Mexican heat as the soldiers battle it out against the best that the dictator Santa Anna has.
In all, Jeff Shaara has written nine New York Times Bestsellers. He has written To The Last Man, a novel of the First World war centering around John Pershing, the Red Baron and the Lafayette Escadrille, the wing of American fighter pilots who rebel against the President’s order to stay out of the war and help France fight off the Germans. This was another ALA Boyd Award winner as well.
So far, Shaara has written three novels on the Second World War, following Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, Erwin Rommel, Omar Bradley and several others. They are just as detailed, just as engrossing, and just as not-put-down-able as the first one, and I can’t wait to see what comes next!
If you love historical fiction and American history, these books should definitely be on your must-read list.
5 out of 5 stars, every one!
Source:
Jeff Shaara’s website and The Goodnight Memorial Library
Check out
Jim on Twitter, Facebook, and his blog!
Thanks to Jim for participating! If you’re a librarian and would like to take part, please send me an email at opinionsofawolf (at) gmail (dot) com.
Guest Book Review: Chalice by Robin McKinley
Please give a warm welcome to my first guest book review participant, Chellie!
Meet the Guest!
My name is Michelle Oleson, and I’m currently the Web/Digital Services Librarian at an academic library. During a normal day, I coax printers into working properly, manage the library’s website content, help students find articles/books/staplers, and read a lot of blogs/tweetage. Outside work, I travel near and far, and enjoy keeping up my mediocre skills at playing flute, Latin, and online gaming.
Summary:
Robin McKinley’s short novel Chalice follows McKinley’s other novels on the Beauty and the Beast theme. Mirasol, a solitary twenty-something, bee-keeping enthusiast, finds herself out her depth as the newly appointed Chalice of her demesne (feudal styled village). The previous Master and Chalice both died under tragic and mysterious circumstances leaving the Willowlands demesne in both political and spiritual chaos. Mirasol must find a balance in her old and new life, in addition to solving the mystery of the Old Master and Chalice’s demise if she’s to successfully serve the new Master: an enigma in and of himself.
Review:
Much of this short novel is devoted to describing an overly complex feudal system with a Druid-esque relationship to land. The story itself could have been concluded inside of 30 pages.
Mirasol leads the narration and all of the movement within the story. While she represents a strong female character (like any Belle), she also lets herself be caught up in forces deemed beyond her control. Fans of Hermione Granger will love her proclivity to spend most days holed away in the library trying to teach herself all the laws and mysticism of being the Chalice.
Mirasol spends most of her internal dialogue puzzling over the new Master. Like any good feudal system, the old Master died leaving an elder son and a younger son. The elder son, being a spoiled brat drunk with power, sends his brother off never to be heard from again. Lucky for the demesne, the older brother manages to get himself killed before completely destroying his people. The leaders of the village have a tough choice to make: bring in an outsider to rule or try to restore the younger brother.
The younger brother has been living his life as a monk in service to Fire Elementals. He returns to lead his people as something of a Fire Element himself. His first act as Master is to burn Chalice/Mirasol to the bone by barely touching her.
Then nothing happens for a long time while Mirasol goes to the library, thinks about how awesome her bees and honey are, how neat being a Chalice is, and wouldn’t the new Master be just dreamy if he was anything at all resembling human. She has two or three conversations with the Master concerning how the land is holding up under all the strain of political upheaval. Neither of them thinks they’re doing a very good job, but hey, at least we’re not getting drunk and dying horribly in a fire…
At some point the higher ups of the realm decide having a Fire Elemental as Master of a demesne is a Bad Plan. These interlopers are only Bad Guys for the sake of moving the story forward. Mirasol, however, comes up with a pretty spectacular plan. The interlopers want to put their own guy on the throne and remove the current Master so he can go back to being a Fire Elemental. Mirasol is already showing signs of being completely smitten with the new Master and feels that the land/people couldn’t survive another change.
McKinley takes Mirasol on a tour of the village blessing every inch and corner of Willowlands with her cup o’ honey. Having successfully done this, she returns to watch the Fire Elemental Master duel it out with swords with the would-be Master. The new guy is obviously a puppet, and wouldn’t even be a threat if the current Master was more corporeal. Cue Fairy Tale Ending: Mirasol has her awesome bees attack the interloper in the middle of the duel. Somehow this is not seen as cheating. All of her bees die; it’s very sad. But from the bodies of thousands of bees, arises the Master returned in the flesh of his enemy. The fallen man lies on the ground burnt to a crisp.
Quick resolution: Mirasol and the Master wed, as it’s obviously the only sensical thing to do.
I loved the fairy tale elements of this story. I think the world could have been more simply explained, but maybe it’s just McKinley’s style to announce something significant, spend pages explicating the history of these circumstances, to return to the conversation once you’re ready to scream Get On With the Story Already.
I’m looking forward to reading McKinley’s Sunshine book, as I’ve heard it’s highly recommended. I would recommend Chalice to fans of overly complex high fantasy, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s books.
3 out of 5 stars
Source:
This book was a gift.
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This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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