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Summary
Summary
James McBride's powerful memoir, The Color of Water, was a publishing phenomenon, spending more than two years on the New York Timesbestsellers list and becoming required reading in high schools and colleges across the country. Now, in his long-awaited second book, McBride turns his highly acclaimed talent as a storyteller to fiction. Based on the historical incident of an unspeakable massacre at the site of St. Anna Di Stazzema, a small village in Tuscany, and on the experiences of the famed Buffalo soldiers from the 92nd Division in Italy during World War II, Miracle of St. Annais a singular evocation of war, cruelty, passion, and heroism. It is the story of four American Negro soldiers, a band of partisans, and an Italian boy who encounter a miracle-though perhaps the true miracle lies in themselves. Traversing class, race, and geography, Miracle at St. Annais above all a hymn to the brotherhood of man and the power to do good that lives in each of us. It reveals to us a little-known but fascinating moment in history through the eyes and imagination of a gifted writer. Like The Color of Water, James McBride's stunning first novel will change the way we perceive ourselves and our world.
Author Notes
James McBride studied composition at The Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and received a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. He was a staff writer for The Boston Globe, People Magazine, and The Washington Post. His works include the memoir The Color of Water, the biography Kill 'Em and Leave, and two novels entitled Miracle at St. Anna and Song Yet Sung. He wrote the screenplay for Miracle at St. Anna when it was made into a movie in 2008. He won the National Book Award for The Good Lord Bird.
He is a saxophonist and former sideman for jazz legend Jimmy Scott. He has written songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., Gary Burton, and Barney, the PBS television character. He received the Stephen Sondheim Award and the Richard Rodgers Foundation Horizon Award for his musical Bo-Bos co-written with playwright Ed Shockley. In 2005, he published the first volume of a CD-based documentary about life as lived by low-profile jazz musicians entitled The Process. He is currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Following the huge critical and commercial success of his nonfiction memoir, The Color of Water, McBride offers a powerful and emotional novel of black American soldiers fighting the German army in the mountains of Italy around the village of St. Anna of Stazzema in December 1944. This is a refreshingly ambitious story of men facing the enemy in front and racial prejudice behind; it is also a carefully crafted tale of a mute Italian orphan boy who teaches the American soldiers, Italian villagers and partisans that miracles are the result of faith and trust. Toward the end of 1944, four black U.S. Army soldiers find themselves trapped behind enemy lines in the village as winter and the German army close in. Pvt. Sam Train, a huge, dim-witted, gentle soldier, cares for the traumatized orphan boy and carries a prized statue's head in a sack on his belt. Train and his three comrades are scared and uncertain what to do next, but an Italian partisan named Peppi involves the Americans in a ruthless ploy to uncover a traitor among the villagers. Someone has betrayed the villagers and local partisans to the Germans, resulting in an unspeakable reprisal. Revenge drives Peppi, but survival drives the Americans. The boy, meanwhile, knows the truth of the atrocity and the identity of the traitor, but he clings to Train for comfort and protection. Through his sharply drawn characters, McBride exposes racism, guilt, courage, revenge and forgiveness, with the soldiers confronting their own fear and rage in surprisingly personal ways at the decisive moment in their lives. Agent, Flip Brophy. Author tour. (Feb. 4) Forecast: The multi-talented McBride he is an award-winning composer as well as a writer acquits himself admirably as a fiction writer. Fans of The Color of Water and readers with wartime memories will make up a strong base audience for his first novel. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Four Americans from the 92nd Buffalo Division and a Tuscan village endure the worst of the war in a brutal and moving first novel from McBride (a bestselling memoir: The Color of Water, 1996). The glossy Tuscany of Frances Mayes and the integrated army of Colin Powell are a half-century in the future in McBride's history-based story of black Americans thrown against African-Americans in the storied 92nd joined New Zealanders, Gurkhas, and other Commonwealth forces to take back central Italy from the still-lethal German army. Today's dreamy hill-towns and mountain vineyards were barren deathtraps in the freezing winter rain. Gigantic, gentle, illiterate Sam Train sets the action moving as he follows orders to snatch a young Italian boy from danger, then runs blindly in the wrong direction, clutching the boy and the souvenir marble head of a Renaissance statue he'd found earlier. Dodging gunfire, Train heads for the hills, convinced that the carving lends him invisibility. Three comrades, a brainy officer, a wily ex-preacher, and a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, try to retrieve Train, but he won't leave the badly wounded child. The four soldiers, surrounded by the Germans massing for a new assault, are eventually forced into the village of Bornacchi, where residents are reeling from the Nazi slaughter of hundreds of their neighbors in the nearby church of St. Anna. Still, in the face of the worst that war has to offer, the villagers-pragmatic, superstitious, realistic and, to the wonder of the black Americans, willing to treat them with respect-not only persist but survive. The Americans' very dicey situation deep in enemy territory is complicated by the arrival of a band of local partisans under command of the legendary Black Butterfly, with his own agenda. All will meet the Wehrmacht, but amid the treachery will come some small miracles before the end. McBride's heart is on his sleeve, but these days it looks just right.
Booklist Review
McBride, the author of the best-selling memoir The Color of Water (1996), turns his hand to fiction in this stirring tribute to the human soul. Sent to Italy to fight under unbelievably harsh and unfamiliar conditions, the members of the Ninety-second all-black, segregated Buffalo Division distinguished themselves both on and off the battlefield during World War II. Cut off from their unit during a botched advance, four GIs become the improbable guardians of a traumatized Italian boy who has lost the power of speech and the ability to remember his past. Refusing to abandon the child, Sam Train, an illiterate giant of a man, insists on carrying the boy to safety. In a remote mountain town, the Americans learn from a handful of suspicious villagers, a rag-tag band of Italian partisans, and a remorseful German soldier that the boy was the only survivor of a brutal massacre. Although McBride touches on issues of race, atrocity, and evil, these diverse characters are able to transcend such human failings through love and faith. --Margaret Flanagan
Library Journal Review
Having conquered nonfiction with The Color of Water, which dwelled on the New York Times best sellers list for two years, journalist McBride takes a chance at fiction. He roots his novel in actual events, relating an encounter between the 92nd Division's Buffalo Soldiers and a little boy from a Tuscan village where a terrible massacre has occurred. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.