“Before you go splashing paint, making a gigantic picture of Hannibal’s battles, you need to know how to draw a horse.” In this novel by Yishai Sarid, an unnamed speaker is clearly “drawing the horse” of Israeli society and establishing the setting in which the animosity between Arabs and Jews has festered, then exploded into a series of continuous battles. Working undercover for the Israeli secret service, the speaker approaches Daphna, an Israeli woman who now teaches writing. He is interested in befriending Daphna, whose long-time friendship with Hani, a seriously ill “man from Gaza,” might lead him to Hani’s son Yotam, regarded as an Arab terrorist and hiding from security, perhaps in another country. Eventually, the speaker must decide whether to allow his humanity to become more important than his lock-step adherence to the age-old belief in the inherent enmity of all “others.” In the process the reader comes to understand the agonizing tension between these two traditional foes and hope that at some point it will be possible for reason to become part of the equation of their lives.
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Jay R. Tunney, a son of the famous prizefighter Gene Tunney (and also vice-president of the International Shaw Society), recreates the story of the twenty-year friendship between his father and George Bernard Shaw with such love, admiration, and sensitivity to the intensely personal relationship between these two men that the reader cannot help but be swept up by this story of two men who, ignoring a forty-year age difference, found enduring satisfaction in each other’s company: John James (Gene) Tunney was thirty-two; Shaw was seventy-three when they met in 1929 when Tunney was on his honeymoon with his bride, Polly Lauder, heiress to the Carnegie fortune. Both men had already achieved the peaks of their professions by that time, and they now had the leisure to explore new realms. Tunney had retired as heavyweight champion of the world in 1928, and Shaw had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. Shaw has said that Tunney helped him “to plant my feet on solid ground.” And Tunney has said, “I think of Shaw as the most considerate person I have ever known.” (My Favorite non-fiction for 2010)
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Set in Belfast and focusing on the long-term hatreds between Catholics and Protestants, and among agencies in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, this complex and violent noir mystery shows all the hatreds and rivalries involving many departments of the police, the British Army, the SAS (Special Air Service), MI5 (one of the UK’s Military Intelligence services), the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force, a paramilitary group) , the UDA (the Ulster Defense Association, another Loyalist force), and various Catholic paramilitary forces. Jack Lennon, a Catholic who has joined the RUC (the Royal Ulster Constabulary) in order to try to form a bridge among the various law enforcement factions in the city, had been on the Major Investigation Team, until he tried to fix a speeding ticket for a man to whom he owed favors and was busted. As Lennon tries to investigate the assassinations, he is repeatedly warned off by higher-ups, who know who seem to know who the killer is but who obviously intend to hang the crime on someone else.
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Those who are already familiar with the five earlier novels in this Icelandic mystery series featuring Erlendur Sveinsson know that Erlendur is a dark, gloomy, introspective, but caring man who does not share much about his life. As the series has developed, however, so has the main character, Erlendur. It is almost as if he has become less shy—as if he has decided to reveal himself to his readers in ways that were not possible in the first novel, Jar City. The hanging death of a young woman at a remote vacation cottage on Lake Thingvellir piques the curiosity of Erlendur when it is discovered that the victim, Maria, is from the Reykjavic area, a married history scholar who has had difficulties coping with the death of her mother two years earlier. Though local police have declared the death a suicide, a good friend suggests to Erlendur that she does not believe the woman, Maria, killed herself.
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Author Carmine Abate grew up in Carfizzi, a small Arberesh village in the toe of Italy, and he returns to that area again* in this novel with a warm and embracing story of a young man’s growing up and his search for his place in the world. Marco has a different life from that of boys in other parts of Italy. Like his father, he may be destined to leave his home in Hora, one day, to spend long periods of time in the mines and fields of France earning enough money to support a family in Italy. Filled with everyday details which bring the community of Hora and the difficult maturation of this young boy to life, The Homecoming Party is a coming-of-age novel, a small morality tale, a domestic drama, and a paean to the beauty which still exists in the hills of southern Italy. By emphasizing the characters’ natural, uncomplicated reactions to important events, and keeping those reactions consistent with the ages of the characters, he allows readers from other parts of the world to participate in a family whose culture is very different from their own.
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