This novel was a delightful summer read, quick, funny and easy to ingest. The storytelling and dialog are sharp and funny, and the characters are engaging and natural.
When a writer sets out to tell the story of an event or short period of their lives they are not always aware of the inherent dangers of doing so. Celebrities who decide to put pen to paper, for all sorts of motivations, can get away with ‘telling it like it is’ to a greater degree than the rest of us. For me, telling the truth (from my perspective) was always going to be a bit uncomfortable, but I didn’t realise the true dangers until the eleventh hour.
The book is part history, part historical fiction. While much of the book is based on outstanding research and first-person interviews, some of the book is told from a perspective which the author himself wrote but relied on historical information for reference. A most interesting way to write the book and a brave decision by the author (who states his method in the forward).
A few years ago I read a wonderful book called Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand I highly recommend the book to everyone.
Check out this trailer below, looks fantastic, hopefully it would do a bit of justice to the story and the man.
White did not underestimate his young audience, in fact he told the Paris review that “You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth.”
I did not have a title yet when I began assembling ideas for a novel that would eventually be published as THE LITTLE GREEN BOOK OF CHAIRMAN RAHMA. In recent years there had been a great deal of publicity about large-scale environmental abuses to forests, water systems, and wetlands committed by a whole host of careless businesses, including developers, logging companies, and even furniture makers, all going into the woods and taking what they needed or tearing down entire forests, destroying magnificent old-grown trees.
About: World of Trouble by Ben H. Winters is the last book in a trilogy starring detective Hank Palace taking place when the world is about the end. The first two books The Last Policeman and Countdown City were a good read and I was looking forward to reading the ending of the trilogy. 320 pages Publisher: Quirk Books Language: English ISBN-10: 1594746850 My rating for World of Trouble — 4 Buy this book in paper or electronic format* More Books by Ben H. Winters Thoughts: World of Trouble by Ben H. Winters is a fitting end to a wonderful trilogy. I really enjoyed the fact that Mr. Winters doesn’t back out of the doomsday scenario he has created for a sappy Disneyesque ending which I was expecting. This novel ties up some loose ends which were introduced in the previous books, also the author concentrated on police procedural more than in the previous novels. That was a good call, I believe, since the first novel as well as part of the second, focused on how society has gone berserk in preparation of the impending doom. In his investigation, Palace meets many characters, some take advantage of the situation for…
The book is actually two well written essays. The first essay is a fascinating look at Colonial America and the life of an 18th Century regular people without the wealth and genealogy of many of our Founding Fathers. The second part is more of a scholarly essay about uses and methods of history.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming is a top notch thriller is the second of what has become the “Blofeld Trilogy”, preceded by Thunderball (book review) and concluded with You Only Live Twice (The Spy Who Loved Me was written in between but is not included in the trilogy).
About: Good Morning, Mr. Mandela by Zelda la Grange is a memoir of Mr. Mandela’s private secretary. This is Ms. la Grange’s first book, which I understand caused some controversy as it is the first such memoir to come out after Mr. Mandela’s death. 384 pages Publisher: Viking Adult Language: English ISBN-10: 0525428283 My rating for Good Morning, Mr. Mandela – 5 Buy this book in paper or electronic format* Thoughts: Good Morning, Mr. Mandela by Zelda la Grange is a heartfelt memoir in which Ms. la Grange shares with the reader her intimate and personal knowledge of Mr. Mandela. The author confirms what we already know; Mr. Mandela was a great humanitarian, an excellent leader and simply, a wonderful human being. Ms. la Grange was very close to Mr. Mandela, in fact he called her his “adopted granddaughter” and was handpicked by Mr. Mandela as a young Afrikaan girl. At first Ms. la Grange was skeptical, being brought up to think blacks were inferior, however Mr. Mandela changed her mind as he changed the whole country. I really liked the way the book is laid out, not only chronologically but by relevant sections within each timeline. For example the…