There’s a spare loveliness to Waldman’s prose, infused as it is with loneliness, humour, and a deep sense of irony in the cyclical prison of our nostalgia for the past. Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die manages a delicate, and all too rare, balancing act between entertainment and introspection.
Category: Book Reviews
Book Reviews
A review The Man Who made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren by Jonathan Lopez
There’s a spare loveliness to Waldman’s prose, infused as it is with loneliness, humour, and a deep sense of irony in the cyclical prison of our nostalgia for the past. Good Americans Go To Paris When They Die manages a delicate, and all too rare, balancing act between entertainment and introspection.
A review of Dirty Money by Richard Stark
Stark as a crime writer is beyond criticism. He does pretty much everything well. The way he writes dialogue, especially scenes where three or more people are talking, is well worthy of study. His art as a storyteller is to create problematical situations, uncertainties, iffy anxious stuff – and then to resolve them in a felicitous manner.
A review of Qmin by Anil Ashokan
Ashokan has come up with some nice options that are still Indian, but light, and so nicely presented, that you could serve them to the Queen. Most don’t take hours and hours of reducing either, which is another problem I’ve encountered with Indian desserts. The Kulfi has been drastically simplified by using condensed milk, and when served with figs and walnuts, it’s really lovely.
A review of Superior Saturday by Garth Nix
He creates amazing traps for his characters, some they can’t escape. (Of course, there are also monsters, puzzles and huge waves made of Nothing!) Then he wraps things up astonishingly, leaving with a cliffhanger that makes you hungrily crave the next book.
A review of Swimming with Crocodiles by Will Chaffey
This sense of both the fragility of nature, and the fragility of man within nature, becomes an underlying theme that carries Swimming with Crocodiles (Picador Australia) beyond simply a travelogue. We begin to identify with Chaffey as a character, and his development becomes meaningful, but we also put his experience into our own context, and it therefore becomes meaningful to us.
A review of The After Life: a memoir by Kathleen Stewart
Kathleen Stewart’s memoir is poetic, courageous, and shocking. She shows how children can be so badly treated, how women can be so badly treated, how the mentally ill can be so inadequately treated, that they can destroy themselves and others and the world continues on, oblivious.
A review of God of Speed by Luke Davies
Though Davies’ Hughes isn’t exactly a likable character, the intimacy is so striking and the intensity of the portrait so great that Hughes becomes someone entirely familiar. Not so much the grand aviator with all the superlatives of his status: richest, fastest, most inventive, but instead, a man like any other, pursued by demons and running hard to find a way to live through them.
A review of Through A Glass, Darkly by Bill Hussey
Hussey has been kind to the reader by slicing his novel into bed-time-reading sized chapters. But unless you like your nightmares to be as ‘jittery as a dog full of fleas’ then read Through a Glass Darkly on a bright summer’s day.
A review of Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon and the journey of a generation by Sheila Weller
As a longtime admirer of all three of these artists, I was rivetted by Weller’s narrative and impressed by her analysis of their lives and legacies. But this is not just a book strictly for the fans of the music – anyone who is interested in womens’ role in society and the period that saw the rise of feminism and the ‘gender wars’ will find much to mull over here.