Astrovian woman. Cosmic MowgliAlways with great interest in novels, the events of which occur in the distant future. It is interesting to compare their philistine fantasies with the flight of thoughts of those whose vocation is literary activity. The novel of Nick Gorky “Astrovite. Space Mowgli ”is part of a science fiction trilogy and is obviously intended for a readership of twelve years or older. All actions and events unfold after 2250, when earthlings can afford to live not only on the Moon and Mars, but also on asteroids. The essential detail is that the aliens are not mentioned on the pages of the novel. The book came to readers in 2008, when interest in the world of science fiction was constantly supported by the release of new works by popular and little-known authors. On the pages of his blog, Nick Gorkavy reports: “My boo...
The Union of Jewish Policemen I would like to start my review with praise – this is one of the most interesting books that I read recently. And at the same time, one of the most controversial. First of all, it is very difficult to determine its genre: despite the fact that in 2008 the Union of Jewish Policemen received the Hugo Prize, awarded for the best science fiction, it can hardly be attributed to this genre with a clear conscience. Most likely, this is a black detective story, because it’s not without reason that the book begins classically: a corpse of a man, a chess player under the name Emmanuel Lasker, was discovered in a hotel room. Nevertheless, almost immediately it becomes clear that the novel is based on the principle of an alternative story – it turns out that US President Franklin Roosevelt opened the doors ...
The Unbearable Lightness of Being “Jokes are bad with metaphors. Even from a single metaphor, love can be born. ” In general, reading a book that is famous and its name has already been imposed on its teeth is a disastrous matter. And when I first took up the “Unbearable Lightness of Being”, already celebrated at that time, I experienced a natural disappointment. Firstly, the poetry of the title has already drawn in my head certain vague outlines that the real book for some reason did not want to match. Secondly – and I realized this only now, after repeated reading – I was still too small. I think that I will be right in assuming that readers leaving comments about the meaninglessness of the novel simply have not accumulated enough everyday experience. After all, a person likes stories that describe himself in some wa...
About the Book: In the ruthless arena of King Henry VIII’s court, only one man dares to gamble his life to win the king’s favor and ascend to the heights of political power England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one da...
About the Book: The title character of this haunting historical novel is Carrie McGavock, whose farmhouse was commandeered as a Confederate field hospital before the tragic battle at Franklin, Tennessee, in November 1864. That day, 9,000 soldiers perished. This tragic event turned McGavock into “the widow of the South.” She spent the rest of her life mourning those lost, eventually reburying nearly 1,500 of them on her property. Robert Hicks’s first historical novel captures the life-altering force that war exerts even on noncombatants. Book Review: ★★★★★★ This is a book that I found very surprising! Usually I avoid Civil War era books, and stories. I find that the subject is so much popular tripe, and the stories become cliche, and disappointing. However, this story proved to be an exception to the rule. ...
About the Book: For Sabrina and Daphne Grimm, life has not been a fairy tale. After the mysterious disappearance of their parents, the sisters are sent to live with their grandmother–a woman they believed was dead! Granny Relda reveals that the girls have two famous ancestors, the Brothers Grimm, whose classic book of fairy tales is actually a collection of case files of magical mischief. Now the girls must take on the family responsibility of being fairy tale detectives. Book Review: ★★★★★★ What a fun read — for children and adults alike! I try to keep as wide a variety of types of books as possible for this blog, because I know that there are as many different tastes in books, and there are books themselves. And since I started, the area I have always been weak in is the books geared to younger generational audiences. An...
About the Book: “Towner Whitney, the self-confessed unreliable narrator of The Lace Reader, hails from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace, and who have guarded a history of secrets going back generations, but the disappearance of two women brings Towner home to Salem and the truth about the death of her twin sister to light.” The Lace Reader is a tale that spirals into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths in which the reader quickly finds it’s nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction, but as Towner Whitney points out early on in the novel, “There are no accidents.” Book Review: ★★★★★★ This is a book that I have actually picked up, and started no less than ten times. And the strange part is I never got past the first three paragraphs, before putting...
About the Book: You have never met a main character quite like Dr. Max Aue. This brilliant middle-class entrepreneur is deeply cultured, well read in philosophy and literature, a connoisseur of fine music. He is also a merciless assassin, a cold-blooded merchant of death, and a secret survivor of the Nazi genocide machine. Jonathan Littell’s epic, 992-page The Kindly Ones places Dr. Aue in front of us as a fictional but completely plausible creation of modern culture. This novel, written in French by an American author, won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award. Book Review: ★★★★★★ I love to read about World War II, and particularly about the Nazi’s and the Holocaust. So when I picked this book up, I was really looking forward to a great new story, in this area. Boy, what a disappointment. I can’t...
About the Book: Leaders of a mercurial clique of girls, Celia and Djuna reigned mercilessly over their three followers. One afternoon, they decided to walk home along a forbidden road. Djuna disappeared, and for twenty years Celia blocked out how it happened. The lie Celia told to conceal her misdeed became the accepted truth: everyone assumed Djuna had been abducted, though neither she nor her abductor was ever found. Celia’s unconscious avoidance of this has meant that while she and her longtime boyfriend, Huck, are professionally successful, they’ve been unable to move forward, their relationship falling into a rut that threatens to bury them both. Celia returns to her hometown to confess the truth, but her family and childhood friends don’t believe her. Huck wants to be supportive, but his love can’t blind him to all that co...
About the Book: “A magnificent epic of love, war and Russia from the international bestselling author of TULLY and ROAD TO PARADISE Leningrad 1941: the white nights of summer illuminate a city of fallen grandeur whose palaces and avenues speak of a different age, when Leningrad was known as St Petersburg. Two sisters, Tatiana and Dasha, share the same bed, living in one room with their brother and parents. The routine of their hard impoverished life is shattered on 22 June 1941 when Hitler invades Russia. For the Metanov family, for Leningrad and particularly for Tatiana, life will never be the same again. On that fateful day, Tatiana meets a brash young man named Alexander. The family suffers as Hitler’s army advances on Leningrad, and the Russian winter closes in. With bombs falling and the city under siege, Tatiana and Alexander ar...
About the Book: Meet Dexter Morgan, a polite wolf in sheep’s clothing. He’s handsome and charming, but something in his past has made him abide by a different set of rules. He’s a serial killer whose one golden rule makes him immensely likeable: he only kills bad people. And his job as a blood splatter expert for the Miami police department puts him in the perfect position to identify his victims. But when a series of brutal murders bearing a striking similarity to his own style start turning up, Dexter is caught between being flattered and being frightened — of himself or some other fiend. Book Review: ★★★★★★ This is a book that was surprising in its originality. For many of my frequent readers, you know that I have some inherent dislikes about mystery novels — mainly because they so frequently follow a standard the...
About the Book: Stalin’s Soviet Union strives to be a paradise for its workers, providing for all of their needs. One of its fundamental pillars is that its citizens live free from the fear of ordinary crime and criminals. But in this society, millions do live in fear . . . of the State. Death is a whisper away. The mere suspicion of ideological disloyalty-owning a book from the decadent West, the wrong word at the wrong time-sends millions of innocents into the Gulags or to their executions. Defending the system from its citizens is the MGB, the State Security Force. And no MGB officer is more courageous, conscientious, or idealistic than Leo Demidov. A war hero with a beautiful wife, Leo lives in relative luxury in Moscow, even providing a decent apartment for his parents. His only ambition has been to serve his country. For this grea...
Posted By kahlee on September 19, 2009 It isn’t very often that I find books that I don’t like, because I memoryalways approach books with the opinion that even if I hate the story — every book has something for the reader to take away. Every book is a growth process, and an opportunity to learn something, even if it is only a little more about yourself. However, this is a book that I didn’t particularly care for. Reason being — I felt like the whole thing was under told. The writing in this book left me feeling like Ms. Edwards had a great idea for a story — but didn’t get much farther than the framework of a book, and then called it good. It is the story of a young couple, expecting their first child. On the night of one of the worst storms of history, they find themselves isolated from the city, and unable to reach the ho...
About the Book: “David McCullough tells the story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence – when the whole American cause was riding on their success, without which all hope for independence would have been dashed and the noble ideals of the Declaration would have amounted to little more than words on paper.” “Based on extensive research in both American and British archives, 1776 is the story of Americans in the ranks, men of every shape, size, and color, farmers, schoolteachers, shoemakers, no-accounts, and mere boys turned soldiers. And it is the story of the King’s men, the British commander, William Howe, and his highly disciplined redcoats who looked on their rebel foes with contempt and fought with a valor too little known.” “Here also is the Revolution as exp...
About the Book: “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings,” declared German poet Heinrich Heine. This book identifies the regime-sponsored, ideologically driven, and systemic destruction of books and libraries in the 20th century that often served as a prelude or accompaniment to the massive human tragedies that have characterized a most violent century. Using case studies of libricide committed by Nazis, Serbs in Bosnia, Iraqis in Kuwait, Maoists during the Cultural Revolution in China, and Chinese Communists in Tibet, Knuth argues that the destruction of books and libraries by authoritarian regimes was sparked by the same impulses toward negation that provoked acts of genocide or ethnocide. Readers will learn why some people–even those not subject to authoritarian regimes–consider the destruction of bo...
About the Book: The surgeon-as-rock-star mystique seems like it must have come straight out of Hollywood, but the myth had to begin more concretely. A good candidate is Minnesota’s Dr. Walt Lillehei, the hard-working, hard-playing father of open-heart surgery, whose life is told in garish color in King of Hearts by journalist G. Wayne Miller. From his early brilliance, recovery from deadly lymphatic cancer, and dramatic repair of seemingly hopeless heart cases to the disintegration of his career at its peak thanks to an army of personal enemies and conviction on tax evasion counts, his story is consistently surprising and engaging. Fast cars, hard drinking, and plenty of women filled his time when he wasn’t turning lives around with a few strokes of his scalpel, and the reader will find the surgeon’s actions almost unbelievable–ra...
Title: The Sleeping Dictionary Series: Daughters of Bengal Author: Sujata Massey Genre: Historical Fiction Publisher: Gallery Books Release Date: August, 2013 Format: Softcover Pages: 528 Source: Goodreads YOU ASK FOR MY NAME, THE REAL ONE, AND I CANNOT TELL. IT IS NOT FOR LACK OF EFFORT. In 1930, a great ocean wave blots out a Bengali village, leaving only one survivor, a young girl. As a maidservant in a British boarding school, Pom is renamed Sarah and discovers her gift for languages. Her private dreams almost die when she arrives in Kharagpur and is recruited into a secretive, decadent world. Eventually, she lands in Calcutta, renames herself Kamala, and creates a new life rich in books and friends. But although success and even love seem within reach, she remains trapped by what she is . . . and is not. As India struggles to throw o...
This is a book that has been recommended to me, I can’t count how many times. And I admit I was a societylittle surprised at the excitement that seemed to exist around it. And, if the truth be told, I have actually started this book at least six times, and every time I have never been able to get past the first half of the book. The format is what I was finding difficult to follow, and frustrating to try and make sense out of. The story is about an author that is seeking a new book subject, when she is contacted by a man that had obtained one of her books, and wrote her to get more information about the author. She ends up finding her new book to write through the history of the occupation of the island of Guernsey, during World War II. The story is developed completely through letters, and journal entries, and this is what I was strugg...
Title: The Lost Sisterhood Author: Anne Fortier Genre: Mystery Publisher: Ballantine Books Release Date: March, 2014 Format: E-Book Pages: 585 Source: Goodreads The Lost Sisterhood tells the story of Diana, a young and aspiring–but somewhat aimless–professor at Oxford. Her fascination with the history of the Amazons, the legendary warrior women of ancient Greece, is deeply connected with her own family’s history; her grandmother in particular. When Diana is invited to consult on an archeological excavation, she quickly realizes that here, finally, may be the proof that the Amazons were real. The Amazons’ “true” story–and Diana’s history–is threaded along with this modern day hunt. This historical back-story focuses on a group of women, and more specifically on two sisters, whose fight ...
I actually enjoyed this book better than I did the other work by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code. This book seems to offer more of a tangible mystery than I felt the The Da Vinci Code did. Also, I felt that the main character — Robert Langdon — was much more developed in this book. This book delves into the background and history of the Catholic church. Set in the Vatican, during Enclave — the story is much more in depth, and more involved than the follow up novel. I found the mystery to be truly interesting to try and figure out. And it still offered all the subjects that made The Da Vinci Code a hit. Symbols, murders, a serial killer and the very obscure elements of history that really get the reader involved. In this particular book not only does Mr. Brown cover the En...
