Book Reviews
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Flash Gordon rocketed onto the movie screen in 1936, in a serial of the same name which ran for 13 episodes. He appeared in two further movie serials – a now defunct format, killed off by television – in Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938) and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940), the latter title indicative perhaps of America’s new-found confidence as an emerging superpower. Most of us who went to Saturday Matinees as a child, to a Rialto or a local Odeon, will have seen some of these episodes, along with (say) a Laurel and Hardy short, a Disney film or a George Formby feature.
What can one fruitfully add to the title, a title which accurately and ably, without undue fuss or bother, describes the book’s contents? Well, first one can expand upon it slightly. The plays in question areIvanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. So, all are what one can call Chekhov’s mature theatrical works.
his is a beautifully produced facsimile of the German edition (it was apparently published in Latin at the time as well) of what has come to be known as the Nuremberg Chronicle. The book sets out to tell the history of the world through seven ages, though the seventh is best described as the age to come, when we can look forward to the coming of the Antichrist, Armageddon and the Last Judgement. Seems crazy to most o us, but these were all very real prospects for Hartmann Schedel and his contemporaries.
Though The Narrow Road to the Deep North is very much a novel of war, and the impact of the war experience, it is also a love story. It is perhaps the love story itself – and the many manifestations of love, as it appears in the book, that affects the transformation. Love too is a permanent force, leaving its imprint, and changing us.
To explain the art of thinking, Konnikova uses the metaphor of the mind as an attic in which memories are filed away. The metaphor works well. The reader will readily understand that attics contain important and less important memories and that some places in the attic are more accessible than others. There is also the problem of remembering where one has placed certain items — memory retrieval. But there is much more to learning how to think than how one deals with memories.
One of the many virtuous attributes of the novel, is the warm and tender friendship between the characters which remain intact even after they go their separate ways after school and university. Another, is the idea of the spiritual search each character is pursuing in order to discover their own personal, ultimate Truth. Macgregor has created a witty, intelligent read, well-suited to those who love an intricate, well-managed mystery.
As a reader, I like to travel along with my characters as they experience life, and change and grow from those experiences. At the beginning of the novel, Harper is a man who expresses little, and at the end of the novel, Harper is still a man who expresses little. Happiness is elusive.
To my way of thinking, the best way to make use of a week in Vienna is to spend one day in the city and another in the country (or outside of the Ring), and to so alternate. You’re thereby assured of a fund of memorable experiences, punctuated by the presence of coffee and cakes, cyclamens and Calvary figures, wine and wonderful scenery.
Fey, a well-travelled American author who writes historical romances under the names Taylor Chase and Gayle Feyrer, has done thorough research for Floats a Dark Shadow, not only into Parisian landmarks and locations, but also into French history, specifically, into Gilles des Rais, and into the Paris Commune (1871), which happened twenty-six years earlier than the time frame of the novel, but is still vivid in Parisians’ memories