Nonfiction oddments: I’m a sucker for motivational How-To books, even though what I invariably get from these ubiquitous sermons is at most a single insight or two. I’m certainly in favour of the rather obvious premise of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything but, I’m afraid to report, this one’s a dud. Despite [...]
Strong writers’ voices make all the difference: The debut novel by Australian-born Evie Wyld, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, tackles the cascading effect of violence, the violence of men at war, through generations. Wyld is an evocative, sure-footed stylist, and her portrait of two Australians, one a Vietnam war soldier, the other an [...]
Hugely disparate in impact and quality: Books that change one’s life are rare (by definition!), so I’m privileged to report the second such in the month of April. Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change, by Australian author and think-tanker Clive Hamilton, is a tour de force of compression and [...]
Also posted in Coal's End |
High-quality nonfiction tackling diverse topics: Jonathan Safran Foer, a scintillating novelist, has turned to nonfiction, a comprehensive work of journalistic investigation and polemics. Eating Animals tackles modern factory farming which dominates American meat production. We all know the factories in which pigs, chickens, turkeys and (less so) cows are grotesquely bred, abused and slaughtered. No [...]
The Pulitzer Prize has been announced (check it out at the source). The winners in the categories I’m interested in are: The Fiction prize has gone to a book from a publisher I’ve never come across, Bellevue Literary Press, a book I’d never heard of (mortification!): Tinkers by Paul Harding. A glance at Amazon puts [...]
Also posted in Literary Fiction |
How Would a Patriot Act?: Defending American Values from a President Run Amok arrived unbidden in the mail. My only guess as to why is that it was sent by author Glenn Greenwald because of a review, perhaps of Standard Operating Procedure. I don’t need to read any more about ex-President Bush’s abuses of power [...]
I’m a great admirer of James Hansen, though not in agreement with all his prescriptions for the planet. His call to arms - Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (what is it with never-ending titles these days?) – came out last December, so why [...]
Also posted in Coal's End |
Last August I avidly read The Lives of Ants by Laurent Keller and Elisabeth Gordon. No doubt I assumed that would do me for ant books for another half decade. Not so – check out this sampler in The New York Review of Books of six stunning photos from Mark Moffet’s forthcoming book Adventures among Ants: [...]
This intriguing review by Charles Bock in the New York Times, of John D’Agata’s About a Mountain, sent me straight to my reading list. The core subject of the book is Yucca Mountain, of great interest to me. But is this work (I’m writing a book on nuclear power) or pleasure? Bock’s review suggests D’Agata’s [...]
Last week’s reading: Parrot and Olivier in America is Peter Carey at his most exuberant, wild almost. Recounting the fictional tale of the trip to the new, troubling democratic nation of the United States of America by French nobleman Olivier-Jean-Baptist de Clarel de Barfleur and an artistic servant thrust upon him, John ‘Parrot’ Larrit. Carey succeeds marvellously in [...]