“New and Notable book reviews - AZCentral.com” plus 1 more |
| New and Notable book reviews - AZCentral.com Posted: 21 Feb 2010 03:14 AM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. 'The Wife's Tale' Lori Lansens (LB, $24.99) Lansens revisits the Ontario town of Leaford, setting of her novels "Rush Home Road" and "The Girls." There we meet 43-year-old Mary Gooch, who has fought a lifelong battle with her weight (she slimmed down once, when she was 17 and had a bout with intestinal parasites). Now she has topped out at 302 pounds and would go higher if she wasn't shaken out of her food-driven malaise when her husband, Jimmy, disappears the night before their 25th wedding anniversary. A good and decent man, he leaves a brief but vague note and $25,000 in their bank account. Mary uses the money to search for him, first in Toronto and then in Los Angeles, where the kindness of strangers opens the door to a new life. Mary is an engaging character, but her misery and self-abuse can become as depressing for a reader as it is for her. And while I won't tell you whether Mary ever finds Jimmy Gooch, the bigger mystery is why he stayed for so long, trying to coax her out of her self-loathing. In this book, the wife's tale isn't complete without a bigger glimpse of the husband's.
Simon Lelic (Viking, $24.95) In this first novel, due out next week, a gunman walks into an assembly at a British school and opens fire, killing three students, a teacher and himself. The shooter was a new teacher at the school, a smart but odd and vulnerable man. It would be easy to blame the crime on his unknown demons, but Detective Lucia May suspects more. We follow her investigation in chapters that alternate with first-person accounts of what led up to that day, told to May by students, parents and staff. This doesn't ring true - they're all too chatty and forthcoming - but what emerges is a story of brutal and relentless bullying, of children and of the shooter, by a few teenage students. The headmaster and other staff did nothing to stop it, which weakens the story (it's difficult to believe that so many people would tolerate repulsive cruelty without objecting to it). What's more, the bullying is mirrored by harassment that May endures, too meekly, at the police station. But even if the plot isn't convincing, Lelic's writing is strong and atmospheric. He's a writer to watch.
Zachary Mason (FSG, $24) In his playful, provocative "novel," (it's really a collection of small stories), Mason has his way with Homer's "The Odyssey," reinventing its tales with cleverness, concision and no small amount of nerve. In a story called "The Myrmidon Golem," Agamemnon orders Odysseus to fetch Achilles, but when Odysseus learns that Achilles is dead ("bitten on the heel by an adder"), he makes a clay figure of him to fight in the dead one's place ("Second thoughts swarmed in Odysseus's mind - the hair did not look real, the skin tone was wrong for a Mycenaean . . . "). The humor is fun, but there are many things in this book to relish: the pathos (as when the Cyclops awakens in agony to find that he has been blinded by Odysseus), the twists, the imaginative leaps and turns. Mason reminds us that before "The Odyssey" solidified into the epic we know, "Homeric material was formless, fluid, its elements shuffled into new narratives like cards in a deck." Now he spreads the cards again, in the cleverest of ways.
Jo Nesbo (Harper, $14.99) If this is the first Harry Hole novel you read, you probably won't miss another. New in paperback, it begins as the Oslo detective investigates a chilling bank heist in which a masked man threatened to shoot a teller if the bank manager took more than 25 seconds to gather a bag of cash. When the nervous manager took six extra seconds, the robber calmly executed the teller before walking out with the money. This is the simple version. There's much more to this crime, to this novel and to Harry Hole, an alcoholic who loves one woman but in her absence will buy himself some trouble when he revisits an insistent former girlfriend. Harry's partner in the bank investigation is an odd but gifted girl named Beate Lonn, whose past plays a part in unfolding events. It's complex but so well written (and perfectly translated by Don Bartlett, who did previous Nesbo novels, including "The Redbreast" and "The Devil's Star") that fatigue never sets in despite the book's nearly 500 pages. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Short takes: Book reviews - Daily Oklahoman Posted: 20 Feb 2010 09:59 PM PST Message from fivefilters.org: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. ©2009 Produced by NewsOK.com. All rights reserved.  Suspense →"Sizzle" by Julie Harwood (Ballantine Books, $26). Lyra Prescott, studying filmmaking in Los Angeles, is taking a documentaries class led by the arrogant professor Mahler. Her documentary is on Paraiso Park, which she finds is now a dump site. But her time-lapse camera reveals something more sinister than garbage dumping. It gets more complicated when she stops at what looks like a yard sale and an angry wife is giving away her husband's possessions. Lyra ends up with books and DVDs, and her problems begin. Two men assault her roommate and break into their apartment. Fortunately, her roommate's brother works for the FBI, and he sends Sam Kincaid, a handsome agent, to act as Lyra's bodyguard. In a short time, he's doing very well at guarding her body. Several attempts are made to kill Lyra, and she still doesn't know why. Lyra's grandmother, Gigi, and Milo Smith, a totally incompetent, idiotic hit man, are delightful characters. The rest is formulaic but fun. — John Harrington History →"Lincoln on Trial: Southern Civilians and the Law of War" by Burrus M. Carnahan (University Press of Kentucky, $30). Carnahan, a retired Air Force officer and a professorial lecturer at George Washington University Law School, explores how Abraham Lincoln was justified under the law of war to treat the civilians of the South during the Civil War with harshness. Many people have considered Lincoln's and his army's treatment of civilians as being unlawful. This book claims he was justified in his actions against the South. Lincoln was careful not to inflict too much misery on the people of the South. Unfortunately, his army was not so concerned. He would intervene when he knew of injustices, some of which Carnahan mentions. Lincoln had to treat the South legally as rebels without recognizing the Confederacy as a nation. Carnahan shows Lincoln crossed that line at times. This book is recommended to those interested in Lincoln and the Civil War. — Benet Exton Religion →"The Templars: Knights of Christ" by Regine Pernoud, translated from the French by Henry Taylor. (Ignatius Press, $14.95). This is the English translation of French historian Pernoud's book "Les Templiers," published in Paris on the Templars. It was written to debunk the various fictional and unhistorical books and movies about the Templars. These include Walter Scott's "Ivanhoe" and Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code." Pernoud gives a short history of the Templars and how, later, King Philip the Fair of France and others of temporal and spiritual realms wanted the Templars' wealth and property. They concocted lies to gain this. King Philip and others died within a year after the Templars were suppressed and some executed. The Templars were founded to do good. Over time, they became rich from gifts given to them for their good deeds, and others envied their wealth. This book is recommended to those interested in the truth about the Templars. — Benet Exton
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