The book begins as a leisurely portrait of two lonely immigrants to England from Zanzibar, one of them a distinguished young professor and the other a 65-year-old asylum seeker who has just arrived, pretending he understands no English. As the points of view shift back and forth between the two men in succeeding sections of the novel, we come to know each man well–his life, his aspirations in Zanzibar, his extended family, the family’s business connections there, and ultimately, the how and why of each man’s emigration to England. Coming from two different generations, each man has a different view of his former country, the older man having spent most of his life there, escaping to England when all other hope is gone, and the younger having left as a young student, but still longing for the connections he left behind. This is passionate book of clear vision, a book which recognizes harsh truths and still remains compassionate.
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Three young college graduates are looking for Eden in the 1990s, someplace the rest of the world has not discovered, where they can live apart from corrupt “civilization” and enjoy the more “meaningful” aspects of a simple life, independent of the rest of the world. Surviving a long sea swim, conquering the cliffs on an uncharted island, and, more importantly, recognizing a dope farm and avoiding the bloodthirsty gunmen who patrol it, the three eventually make their way onto “The Beach,” the utopian society Daffy has told Richard about, and in which he was a founding member. As they settle in and learn the ropes, the three newcomers experience the mystical, sometimes drug-induced peacefulness they’ve always dreamed of. As in Lord of the Flies and other utopian dreams, the magic lasts only until the first big crisis, and on the beach, several crises occur simultaneously.
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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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Posted in Exploration, Non-fiction, Vietnam on Jan 15th, 2011
In describing the excavation of a junk which sank off the north coast of Viet Nam in the mid-fifteenth century, Frank Pope focuses on the people who engage in excavation work–the maritime archaeologist vs. the treasure hunter, the financiers who supply the funds that make underwater excavation possible, the looters (often fishermen) who damage sites, the academics who engage in fierce competition for recognition within the field, and the divers, who have to live underwater in small, pressurized containers for over a month at a time. He also includes the history of maritime archaeology, detailed descriptions of the equipment which has evolved to make deep dives possible, the status of current technology in the field, and the complex systems which support “saturation divers,” who may be working at eight atmospheres of pressure. Almost a million rare Vietnamese porcelain and ceramic artifacts from the fifteenth century are discovered.
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The author raises more questions than he answers. James Stephenson’s memoir about the Hadzabe in Tanzania, one of the last tribes of hunter-gatherers, is fascinating, though not always in ways the author probably intended. As much about the 27-year-old author and the casual romanticism with which he plunges into life in another culture as it […]
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