You wouldn’t want these friends for dinner, but you might like a laugh at their expense. The wry sardonic humour that fills these pages isn’t entirely unpleasant, though it might be a little sour. Her Mouth Looked Like a Cat’s Bum is an original, interesting take on a world you don’t want to be living in; a funny (at times), racy, and disorientating descent into Hades.
A review of Chess Facts and Fables by Edward Winter
There are many diagrams of chess positions, and many photographs and line drawings of famous and little-known players, and these add to the value of the book. For anyone with an interest in chess history, this volume is a wonderful treasure trove. It is perfect for browsing, whether one happens to be in one’s library or on one’s lavatory.
A review of Virginia Woolf by Julia Briggs
This book dwells necessarily on the Bloomsbury group, a subject of so many books that saturation impairs the urgency of its interest, but she surmounts this as much as possible by an emphasis on Woolf. She has written a model of what good literary criticism should be. This is an excellent book to add to the collection of any reader who requires a useful and intriguing book on a fascinating but often elusive writer.
A review of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight translated by Simon Armitage
Is this a neglected book? If so, it deserves your attention. It will require perhaps two hours of your time, but it will be time spent acquiring a lasting experience and a durable memory of great value.
Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland
The Idi Amin that Forest Whitaker presents in The Last King of Scotland is charming, earnest, friendly, instinctive, intense, mercurial, paranoid, punishing, relentless, shrewd, and very powerful: a dazzling personality, a frightening man. Although I had remembered, possibly too vaguely, Idi Amin’s brutality, I had been looking forward to Whitaker’s performance and the film months before seeing The Last King of Scotland, thinking that it sounded like a great opportunity for a unique actor.
Tradition and Conscience: Painter Kerry James Marshall’s Colorful Narratives
It had been a rather simple program: a documentary, some slides, a conversation, all part of the library’s February 2007 African-American history program, but the program has introduced, or reintroduced, us to an artist of our time, a young master (there was some questioning and quibbling about the 52-year old artist’s age near the end of the program).
A review of Russians Versus Fischer by Dmitry Plisetsky and Sergey Voronkov
What is so extraordinary about Russians Versus Fischer, though, is the way in which it uses a myriad of till-now confidential documents from the archives of the USSR Chess Federation and the Soviet Sports Committee, many of them dating from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, to tell the story of Fischer’s rise from a Soviet perspective; i.e. from the viewpoint of those who had most to lose from it.
A review of Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
I’m not sure why it is better for the author to spoil the plot, than for some purported friend of the reader to do the same! But — if I may be permitted to issue a meta-spoiler, or a spoiler about spoilers — there is no need to worry that Trollope is going to go off the deep end in this respect. You will still find suspense a-plenty.
A review of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Dawkins is such a clear thinking scientist that he manages, through analogy, metaphor, logical argument, and example to make his points with the kind of clarity that religious theologians rarely reach. This book is a joy to read, and never gets dry or terse. Instead Dawkins’ good humour and sense of humanistic pleasure in science and discovery are constantly evident.
A review of The Paris Review Interviews, volume 1
Overall, Gourevitch’s hope that these interviews will stand “if not as definitive portraits of each artist, then as a significant contribution to such an ultimate portrait, with the added fascination that they are in large measure self-portraits” has been, on my reading, largely fulfilled.