If you’re going to mix brains with bosoms, however, you have to be very careful stylistically. Readers don’t mind sex, we’re very fond of it in some cases, but we do mind when it’s over the top. And what jars in the racier bits jars overall. Underneath the adjectives and adverbs, there’s a streamlined, engaging book in here. It just needed a firm editor on passages like these
Barnes’s giant of the Western world is short, sharp, and funny, and well worth spending time with, even if he is, perhaps, more modern Englishman than ancient Greek in some places. As a taste of philosophical ideas Coffee with Aristotle is just right – now if only the longer treatises were as palatable.
Goodwin now returns with another mystery, a tale as exotic as the first one, delicious in its evocation of the last days of the Ottoman dynasty. Here, however, the territory is dangerously personal.
These days the historical mystery buff can choose from works featuring Owen Archer, Prioress Eleanor, Petroc of Auneford, Mathew Shardlake, and many others. From a brief survey of the genre, it’s a wonder that anyone noticed when the Black Death took hold, as the inhabitants of Britain had apparently been offing each other in industrial numbers right through the medieval era.
Enter Howard Frank Mosher and his delightfully picaresque novel THE TRUE ACCOUNT – A Novel of the Lewis & Clark & Kinneson Expeditions.
Aharon Appelfeld’s new novel, All Whom I Have Loved is indeed a riveting, if ominous tale, a story we learn from the near-desperate utterances of a child facing not only his own developmental and family struggles, but the turmoil of an unwelcoming world, that of the East Europe of a prospering Nazi party in the late 1930s!
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