Killers of the Flower Moon By David Grann
Reviewed by Michael Attard The Osage Indians have a more than 2000-year history in North America, but I will start in 1803. In that year, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson purchased … Read More
Category: Book Review
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Reviewed by Michael Attard The children are living in what appears to be a private boarding school for a select few, but something is amiss. There is no mention of … Read More
Think Like A Monk by Jay Shetty
Reviewed by Michael Attard Officially, Jay Shetty was a monk for three years. So, one might ask, “If being a monk is so great, then why did he quit?” Simply … Read More
A Tangled Web: Mata Hari: Dancer, Courtesan, Spy
Mary Craig is an historian specializing in the history of central Europe from 1848 to 1933. Mata Hari was born in 1876 and executed in October 1917. The biography reads … Read More
Silverviewby John le Carré
John le Carré is the author of 26 spy novels; several have been adapted to film. His careers in the British Security Service, M15, and the British Secret Intelligence Service, M16, have provided the backbone for his work. Silverview, his last book, was published posthumously by his son in 2021. The son states that the novel was completed, but interestingly, it is the shortest of his books, and several reviewers, including myself, have assessed that the story concludes without a proper ending.
Circumstances revolve around 33-year-old Julian Lawndsley, a formerly successful trader who has exchanged his hectic London life for the quieter lifestyle of an English countryside book seller. However, Lawndsley is not the main character. Rather, this would be Edward Avon, who goes by various names. The moral dilemma is never more than implicit, but struggles with keeping a balance between serving his adopted country and his private morals. He is married to a spy. The peculiar situation is such that one comes to see “…the entire Avon clan and its offshoots as being united, not in the secrets they shared, but in the secrets, they kept from one other.”
The Years by Annie Ernaux
Reviewed by Michael Attard “All the images will disappear.” These words comprise the only sentence in the opening paragraph of Annie Ernaux’s book, The Years. Set as they are on … Read More
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez was born in Colombia in 1927. He wrote sixteen novels during his lifetime and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. His novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, was published in 1985. It is not generally considered to be his best work, but it has been acclaimed as his most romantic novel.
The setting is a coastal city in Colombia, and the timeframe covers about sixty years from the later 19th century to the early 20th century. The premise involves the question, “What happens when a young man’s unrequited love is unable to break his spirit?”
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
In the story, it becomes clear early that the narrator is “Death.” This distinctive form of storytelling creates a magical atmosphere which transcends what readers normally expect. The book is a war story, and Death is an appropriate entity to tell it. But the author does not paint Death as omniscient; rather, Death is an onlooker, puzzled and amazed by the extreme duality people exhibit. Death perceives human uniqueness in the thousands of colors that he sees in the sky, marking the places where he must go to gather the soul.