Within the two hundred fifteen pages of this allegorical short book, Evelio Rosero creates a microcosm of Colombian rural life in the fictional community of San Jose, where no one knows who will attack them next—the army, the paramilitaries, the guerrillas, or the drug lords. Though the residents are peaceful small farmers and businessmen with few, if any, ties to the “outside” world and virtually no interest in the country’s politics, every militant faction vying for power in Colombia somehow believes that these residents constitute an imminent threat. They convince themselves that specific San Jose residents must certainly be allied with their enemies, since their “enemies” are whoever has not declared allegiance to their own vague goals. The four militant groups each want to dominate and control the area simply to prevent any other group from controlling it, and they are willing to massacre innocent men, women, and even babies to achieve their bloody but elusive goals. As the village comes under fire from bloodthirsty enemies as undifferentiated to the residents as they are to the reader, the author’s universal themes of good vs. evil, power vs. subservience, and human kindness vs. barbarism become obvious.
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Despite the garish cover, with its closeup of cellulite-free legs and the suggestion of a bathing beauty body, this book is not a steamy potboiler. Instead, the cover accurately reflects the values of the beautiful people of Cascade Heights, a gated and walled residential community thirty miles outside Buenos Aires with full-service security–along with a golf course and top-quality tennis. The wealthy residents of The Cascade, as they call the community, have left their old lives behind, and many of them are delighted to have escaped some unpleasant memories. Living in elaborately built houses with spectacular landscaping, the three hundred residents have created a world apart, their children leaving for brief periods each day to attend an equally elite school outside the community, and then returning home, where they can wander the grounds at will, without supervision. The novel begins on Thursday night, September 27, 2001, when Teresa Scaglia returns home and doesn’t hear any noise from the card room or pool. Thinking that El Tano and his friends are in the changing room at the pool, she goes to bed. When she awakens later, she discovers that he and two of his friends are dead.
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William Langewiesche’s analysis of all the factors which contributed to the “Miracle on the Hudson” is a story that matches the events themselves in terms of excitement. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, pilot of the Airbus A320 which hit a flock of geese, lost both engines, and landed in the Hudson River with no loss of life on January 15, 2009, has rightly been lauded for his performance and has become a popular hero. But he was not alone in the making of this miracle. The plane itself contributed mightily to the successful outcome and the saving of the lives of all one hundred fifty passengers and five crew. Designed to remain stable under the most extraordinary conditions, the French-made Airbus is controlled by computerized systems which can not be over-ridden by pilots as they make split second moves during emergencies–in other words, they “fly by wire.” A must read for lovers of non-fiction.
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Author “James Church,” a former western intelligence officer with “decades of experience” in Asia, including, presumably, North Korea, provides a stunning and profoundly interesting portrait of “real life” in this secretive and sometimes paranoid country. Inspector O, the main character in Church’s novel, works for the North Korean Ministry of People’s Security, but even at the level of inspector, he has no idea why he is assigned many of his tasks, and he does not know why he is often sent from the capital, Pyongyang, to outposts like Manpo and Kanggye on the Chinese border. All he knows is that his camera never has batteries that work, that finding a cup of tea is sometimes impossible, and that he does not rate a thermos. He expects to be tailed and spied upon, and he is accustomed to having his living quarters searched. The exact nature of the central mystery remains elusive, even into the final pages. This novel has, however, gained a great deal of positive publicity among diplomats and sites dealing with foreign relations. Peter Hayes of the Nautilus Institute, Policy Forum Online has said in his review: “[This] is the best unclassified account of how North Korea works and why it has survived all these years when the rest of the communist world capitulated to the global market a decade ago.”
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On a fine Saturday morning in April, the Yale campus discovers that more than two dozen students have gone missing in the past thirty-six hours, many of them the children of parents prominent in industry and government. Most of them have recently been “tapped” for one of Yale’s secret societies—such as Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, and Book and Snake. All these societies own elaborate Greek edifices on campus, the most prominent architectural feature of which is the complete lack of windows. Inside these “tombs,” the societies’ secrets remain absolute. This morning, everyone’s attention is on the tomb of Book and Snake, where, it appears, the missing students are being held hostage, part of a unique terror plot that makes this the most exciting thriller I’ve read in years.
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Gabriel Allon, working on behalf of Israeli security, stopped a shipment of sophisticated Russian weapons destined for Al-Qaeda during Daniel Silva’s previous novel, Moscow Rules. Now, six months later, Allon is enjoying some much needed time to himself. Recently married to his long-time love Chiara, and doing the work he loves best, restoring fine artworks for the Vatican, he is living happily incognito in rural Italy, forever grateful to Col. Grigori Bulganov of Russia’s FSB counterintelligence division for having saved his life, not once, but twice, during that previous traumatic adventure. When Grigori Bulganov suddenly disappears from England amidst rumors that he was a double agent who has returned to Russia, however, Gabriel becomes alarmed. He believes that Bulganov has been kidnapped by Ivan Kharkov, who wants revenge against everyone involved in the previous events, which culminated in his humiliating loss of his wife and children.
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A Short History of Women is a novel which illustrates where we are now and how we got here, a story which Walbert creates in marvelous descriptive language. Tracing five generations of one family from 1899 through the present, Walbert shows the myriad ways in which women have challenged the status quo, succumbed to it, or made their statements, for better or worse, their stories here existing almost as a series of interrelated short stories. Dorothy Townsend, around whom the book revolves, is thirty-four in 1914, when she decides that the only avenue open to her as a protest against the treatment of women as lesser beings, is to starve herself to death, an act which leaves her two young children orphans. As the novel broadens and traces Dorothy’s descendants through five generations, we see them all working with the same sense of purpose as Dorothy, though with less dire results.
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Posted in 1: 2009 Reviews, Book Club Suggestions, Experimental, Historical--21st century, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Iran, Literary, 2007-09 on Jun 27th, 2009
When I picked up this book, written by anIranian author popular in his own country, my only expectation was that it would be an interesting view of life in Iran today, and, in particular, the life of a writer trying to avoid the “thought police.” What I never expected was that the book would be so funny! The author, having reached the “threshold of fifty,” tells us at the outset that he intends to write a love story, one that is “a gateway to light. A story that, although it does not have a happy ending like romantic Hollywood movies, still has an ending that will not make my reader afraid of falling in love. And, of course, a story that cannot be political.” Most importantly, he says, “I want to publish my love story in my homeland.” The author then becomes the narrator of two stories—a fictional love story, which appears here in boldface, and a metafictional commentary by the author of the love story, in regular type. Witty, cleverly constructed, satiric, and full of the absurdities that always underlie great satire, Censoring an Iranian Love Story is a unique metafiction that draws in the reader, sits him down in the company of an immensely talented and very charming author, and completely enthralls him.
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