The land of Mesopotamia, in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, once boasted the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, among the Seven Wonders of the World. Highly developed ancient civilizations competed for power there, leaving behind sites of immense archaeological importance as they defeated each other and formed new civilizations. In the modern era, Mesopotamia, now known as Iraq, fell under a succession of foreign rulers, and by 1914, when this novel opens, it was ruled from Constantinople by the weakened Ottoman Empire. Virtually every country in Europe is on site, vying for oil. The Germans are building a railroad from Basra through Baghdad, an American from Standard Oil is there, the French are trying to gain a foothold so that the railroad will not take shipping business from them, and the Russians and the Austro-Hungarian Empire may help finance the railroad in exchange for a piece of the action. Trying to ignore most of this turmoil is John Somerville, a thirty-five-year-old archaeologist who has been working an ancient site near Baghdad. In the nonstop action, no one can trust anyone else. Unsworth creates a vibrant picture of a tumultuous time and place, endowing what might have been an exotic tale of archaeological discovery with a broader thematic scope.
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Posted in 9c-2009 Reviews, Argentina, Austria, Experimental, Germany, Literary, Mexico, Mystery, Thriller, Noir on Jan 16th, 2011
Mexican author Ignacio Padilla creates characters who move like pawns, as if they were pieces in the chess games which are at the heart of the action here–they are often being overtaken by events and supplanted by other men as part of the grand, overall “game” of life. Padilla raises thought-provoking questions about the nature of selfhood here, as men appropriate each other’s names, accept or reject the past which is connected with those names, and hope, ultimately, to change their destinies by living someone else’s life. The reader must constantly question whether each character is who he says he is, and whether he really is who we think he is. The tight story line maintains its tension, and the author’s ingenuity in manipulating characters and historical events provides constant surprises. The novel is very much an intellectual chess match between author and reader, and in this case, both turn out to be winners.
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The Leopard, an assassin who figures in a number of Silva novels, becomes a major player in this third Gabriel Allon novel, about the passive involvement of the Vatican in the Holocaust and its subsequent denial of all responsibility. Basing the novel on research by scholars like Susan Zuccotti (whom Silva credits in his acknowledgments) into the secret connections between factions within the Catholic Church and the Third Reich, Silva creates a chilling and utterly compelling story about the reasons that the Vatican might have feared the Jews were a threat to its own power and wanted to prevent the ultimate establishment of an Israeli homeland.
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Within this engrossing story of love and war in Berlin and Mostar, Yugoslavia, from 1989 to 1992, John Marks considers the subject of divided cities-and the damaging effects on the people who live in them. The Wall dividing East and West Berlin has just come down, and Germany is in the process of reunification, attempting to erase the invisible walls still dividing the people of Berlin and of Germany as a whole. Arthur Cape, an American reporter for Sense magazine, has been in Berlin since 1989, when he arrived there from India at the age of thirty. He and Eric Hampton, the senior editor, have been filing reports from Berlin, documenting the story of the reunification and the surprises which have accompanied it. The novel gets off to a quick start with the appearance of the Halloween “revenant,” and Marks’s crisp prose and ability to select perfect, illustrative details advance the action and keep the story moving at breakneck speed. The peaceful reunification of Berlin offers a poignant and moving contrast to the growing violence of Mostar, with Marks presenting a clear picture of the conflicts through the action, never allowing the complexities of historical background to overwhelm his story.
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The search for dinosaur fossils amid sandstorms and desert heat is anything but dry in this lively story of the excavation in January, 2000, of a site in the western Egyptian desert, partially excavated by Ernst Stromer in 1911, but untouched since then. Nothdurft, a professional writer, working in concert with Josh Smith, the young paleontologist who was the team leader of the January, 2000, dig, tells the stories of both the 1911 and the 2000 excavations, along with the fossil discoveries made by each group. Stromer, a German aristocrat and meticulous paleontologist, found the fossils of four unique, 95-million-year-old dinosaurs in Bahariya in 1911, spent twenty years analyzing them, and then supervised the fossils’ installation at the Bavarian State College of Paleontology and Historical Geology in Munich. In April, 1944, everything was lost in the allied bombing of Munich.
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