FRIDAY: My Book World | Adam Schiff's Midnight in Washington
0 Comments
My Book World Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall: A Novel. Book One of the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy. New York: Picador, 2010.
Quite an enjoyable read, one that combines history and literature alike. I read this one aloud to my partner and was able to hear what a masterful job Mantel does with the language—quite musical. She, more than most writers, makes great use of interior monologue, by which we always know who is thinking what. This retelling of King Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Thomas Cromwell (among a distinguished cast of many) is worthy of all the accolades it has received (winner of England’s Man Booker Prize). Can’t wait to read the other two parts of this distinguished trilogy. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD
TOMORROW: My Book World | Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall
FRIDAY: My Book World | Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall
FRIDAY: My Book World | Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall
My Book World Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Duggan, 2018.
A scholarly and erudite book, The Road to Unfreedom is a plea for Western peoples to wake up and smell the borscht burning on the stove. Snyder begins with two phrases: politics of inevitability, “a sense that the future is just more of the present,” and that nothing can be done (7); the other phrase, politics of eternity “places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood” (8). As Snyder develops his thesis that both Europe and American could be on the way to unfreedom, he repeatedly weaves into the fabric of his text these two terms. Russia has already traveled down this road, accepted its role as victim, that the world is always out to get Russia. If Europe and America do not pay attention to the signs of fascism or authoritarianism present in their own countries, they, too, could wind up like Russia. For the general reader, this book can be tough reading, but I invite anyone wanting to know what might be wrong with our country to take a look at it. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall: A Novel. Book One of the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy
FRIDAY: My Book World | Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom
FRIDAY: My Book World | Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom
My Book World Evans, Siân. Maiden Voyages: Magnificent Ocean Liners and the women Who Traveled and Worked Aboard Them. New York: St. Martin’s, 2020.
This is an interesting book in which Welsh author Evans focuses on thirteen women (some famous, some not) in the early twentieth century who make careers on the seas. Mostly by way of working on lines such as the White Star and Cunard, these women toil as conductresses, stewardesses, and nurses, sometimes rising to supervisory positions. During an era when women are not encouraged or even allowed to work outside a domestic situation, these women serve as pioneers who earn good salaries and are able to support families back home in the UK, where the man of the household, say, has been lost to war. Of course, their success is hard won, and it is only a beginning, but indeed there must be a thread that connects them to airline hostesses and to female astronauts such as Sally Ride. A quick but meaningful read. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
TOMORROW: My Book World | Siân Evans's Maiden Voyages
FRIDAY: My Book World | Siân Evans's Maiden Voyages
FRIDAY: My Book World | Siân Evans's Maiden Voyages
My Book World Shute, Nevil. On the Beach. New York: Morrow, 1957.
This novel, which could have worked as a cautionary tale in its publication year, 1957, can still bring shivers to one’s spine. In this narrative, the worst has already happened, a vague war begun, on accident, between Russia and China, in which nuclear warfare destroys most of the northern hemisphere. Only the Australians and other South Pacific cultures survive . . . for a while. As we know, such high amounts of radiation kill immediately and keep on killing over weeks and months as its fine particles continue to float to earth. The main characters realize intellectually what will happen but continue to live as if death won’t come, racing in a local grand prix, planting a garden one won’t benefit from, collecting presents for one’s children when one “returns” to his family in America. Shute is deft in creating what looks like denial and yet is a way for characters to cope, until the very end. At that time, little red pills of barbiturates have been distributed like penny candy, and we see each one take his or her dosage and end their lives peacefully. We are made to consider, however, what will happen to the earth itself. After a number of years, so Shute believes, the radiation will clear, the earth will be ready for inhabitation again. It shall repopulate itself with some kind of creatures. The novel has one final lesson for those living today. Nuclear war is the ultimate global warming, the ultimate in climate change. Forever. The thought should still give us pause. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD
TOMORROW: My Book World | Nevil Shute's On the Beach
FRIDAY: My Book World | Nevil Shute's On the Beach
FRIDAY: My Book World | Nevil Shute's On the Beach
MY BOOK WORLD Brandon, Will. The Wolf Hunt: A Tale of the Texas Badlands. A Derrick Miles Mystery. No City: Gale, 2021.
Full disclosure moment: I am part of the Lubbock, Texas, Ad Hoc writing group of which the author speaks in book’s Acknowledgements page. I mention this fact, not to tout my involvement in the enterprise but to give some context. The author brought bits and pieces of this work in its infancy to our group. Some of it, like all our writing, was rough, a work-in-progress, but always what was generated created great interest on the part of all members. We can’t wait to read more was a common comment. What Brandon has realized here goes far beyond, in my opinion, what might have transpired in less capable hands. This book succeeds in being so many things: a pastiche of the highest order, writing “in the style” of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles; a bit of a cozy mystery; and a great bit historical novel. Setting the novel in nineteenth-century Texas but always with an eye to England, where its murder victim hails from, the author creates an admixture of American and British English diction born of a particular period. Historical details give great interest and credit to the work, in which, for example, the narrator, Doctor Hooper, uses one of the first Kodak cameras to great effect. The author’s details on how the camera works not only read with authenticity but are crucial to his helping his partner, Derrick Miles, to solve the mystery. No point in recreating the plot, if one is acquainted with Doyle’s book. Readers will find its points familiar, yet with their own twists here and there. If you’re a mystery junky, or if you just like well-crafted fiction, I trust you will enjoy Will Brandon’s The Wolf Hunt. Get a copy! NEXT BLOG: November 9, 2021
TOMORROW: My Book World | Will Brandon's The Wolf Hunt
FRIDAY: My Book World | Will Brandon's The Wolf Hunt
FRIDAY: My Book World | Will Brandon's The Wolf Hunt
My Book World Baldwin, Alec. Nevertheless: A Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 2017.
In some ways this is an ordinary celebrity book. Baldwin writes about his acting career, his divorce from a famous actor, his new wife and family, and all his children. But Alec Baldwin also distinguishes himself by sharing how he comes to be an actor. In his preface he tells of his childhood, of wanting to be something one day and something else the next day. Acting allows him to become, in a sense, all of these things through the roles he plays. He also shares with readers about how his childhood of near destitution (his mother and five siblings living on their father’s teaching salary). Most interesting, however, is his quest to find himself, to be true to his desire to balance himself on that fine tightrope of acting for its own sake (the stage, the Broadway stage) and film (its commercial and sometimes lucrative nature). He glosses long lists of books he loves, plays and films he loves, actors (male and female) whom he loves and why. He peppers his writing with pieces of classical music he admires—a sign of a truly educated person. Baldwin's is a rich life of pursuing happiness and sometimes coming up short but also getting up off the floor and trying again, whether to connect with a new woman or say yes to a new play or tackle the fields of philanthropy or politics. The man is that bright and that secure that he can make these choices and live with them. Because, in his youth, he is soooo good looking (the only reason I watched TV’s Knot’s Landing), he is sometimes approached or accosted by gay men who believe they might get lucky. To Baldwin’s credit, he is secure enough in his personhood, his masculinity, that he (by his own recognizance anyway) takes these incidents in stride (informing one man, an older mentor, however, that if he ever kisses him full on the mouth again, he will break every bone in his body—yet they do remain friends). He even goes as far as to say he “loves” a certain man he’s worked with and who knows? “he might be gay.” We know he isn’t, but it’s sweet of him to be so empathic that he might give it some consideration. That seems to be what his whole life is about: giving a role consideration before dispensing with it or forging ahead. We all should be so considerate in our own roles. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Will Brandon's The Wolf Hunt: A Tale of the Texas Badlands. A Derrick Miles Mystery
TOMORROW: My Book World | Alec Baldwin's Nevertheless
FRIDAY: My Book World | Alec Baldwin's Nevertheless
FRIDAY: My Book World | Alec Baldwin's Nevertheless
My Book World Hazzard, Shirley. The Great Fire. New York: Farrar, 2003.
This novel takes place all over the globe, it seems, in the period following World War II. When one first encounters the word “fire,” one believes that the book may be about a single fire. The next false signal is near the end of Part One in which, in a flashback to 1942, one witnesses a plane crash: “There was an explosion after the crash, then a great fire that, despite the rains, smouldered on overnight. The villagers struggled up in the wet, but explosions kept them off” (52). Mere foreshadowing. The main character, Aldred Leith, recalls, as a youth, visiting a monument to WWI in London, one of over 300 steps: “The monument to the Great Fire” (91). Leith, in his thirties, falls in love with a girl of seventeen and eventually marries her, but even that relationship of love cannot save him from the author’s great fire, the war through which he has just lived: “Even to her, he would not say outright that he was thinking of death: of the many who had died in their youth, under his eyes; of those he had killed, of whom he’d known nothing. On the red battlefield, where I’ll never go again; in the inextinguishable conflagration” (278). Any war is comprised of fire, from fireball to friendly fire, but Hazzard transforms war from an abstraction into one single, eternal event, as she says, a conflagration. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD |
AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
http://amazon.com/author/rjespers Archives
May 2021
Categories
All
Blogroll
Websites
|
RSS Feed