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A Little History of the World by E H Gombrich |
Written for children some seventy years ago - before the author's ground-breaking The Story of Art (bwl 13) - but published in English for the first time last year, this little book tells in an almost grandfatherly manner the history of western civilisation from the Stone Age to the age of the atom. The clarity and confidence of the writing make it a pleasure to read. Astonishingly, the author wrote it in six weeks when he was only 26.
(bwl 35 July 2006) |
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A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson |
This is the author's account of his attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail, which stretches for 2,100 miles from Georgia to Maine. Bryson walked about 40 per cent of it - an impressive achievement. He is good company, cheerful, and always a mine of information. He has a keen appreciation of the eccentricities of his fellow walkers, and of his own inadequacies, and is enthusiastic about the splendours of the landscape. He is also very funny.
(bwl 30 June 2005) |
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Amongst Women by John McGahern |
Moran is a former Republican who spent his early years fighting the British in the War of Independence. Now he is old, living out his life in the country where his daughters do their best to accommodate to his various moods. The days of his glory are over and he has to come to terms with a new Ireland. The poignant mix of love and bitterness, set against a very Irish background, makes this compelling reading.
*Editor's note: Winner of the 1990 Booker prize
(bwl 30 June 2005) |
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Basil Street Blues by Michael Holroyd |
Holroyd's search to discover his family history is an entrancing story, beautifully written and often very funny, though the author himself remains elusive. An only child, largely brought up by his paternal grandparents and a tennis-playing aunt - his parents divorced early on - he thrived on being invisible. But as he engagingly charts the mixed fortunes of his family he gradually begins to emerge from the shadows.
(bwl 32 November 2005) |
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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer |
Nine-year-old Oskar finds a key which he believes that his father who died in the 9/11 disaster left as a hidden message for him. But there are 162 million locks in New York and the quest is daunting even for inventive clever Oskar. As he travels around the city he is drawn into a moving family mystery. The story is fascinating but the typographical twists left me unconvinced.
(bwl 45 April 2008) |
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Looking for George - Love and Death in Romania by Helene Drysdale |
Travelling around Romania with friends in 1979, undergraduate Helena meets priest-poet George. Back in Cambridge, she repeatedly receives yearning letters from him, begging her to help him escape. Twelve years later, Helena, now happily married, goes back to look for him, conscious that their encounter had changed his life. Her quest takes us through a subdued and frightened but still beautiful post-Communist Romania, and she finally uncovers the mystery of his disappearance. An unforgettable story.
(bwl 42 October 2007) |
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National Service - Diary of a Decade at the National Theatre by Richard Eyre |
Even if you don't normally read diaries try this one. Eyre's account of his decade (1987-97) as director of the National Theatre is a most engaging read and he is disarmingly honest about his frequent self doubts. Name-dropping is of course inevitable and the famous stroll across almost every page, but there are also insights into the craft of acting and directing and fascinating descriptions of what it takes to keep it all going.
(bwl 45 April 2008) |
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Soldiers of Salamis* by Javier Cercas |
The search for the truth behind the story of the fascist writer who'd faced a firing squad at the end of the Spanish Civil War, and survived, becomes an obsession for the author and he sets out to discover what really happened. When he finally tracks down the old soldier who may have been the militiaman who spared him, the story begins to have real momentum. An interesting but not an easy read.
*Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2004
(bwl 47 September 2008) |
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The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath |
This is Sylvia Plath's only novel, and probably largely autobiographical. The narrator, Esther Greenwood, young, ambitious and intelligent, arrives in New York one hot summer to work on a women's magazine. As she tries to adjust to what she sees as the sophistication of the city she slowly slides into a nervous breakdown. I liked the controlled stark prose and the narrator's flashes of self-deprecatory humour, as well as the glimpses of 1950s New York.
(bwl 35 July 2006) |
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The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones |
This book should be essential reading for anyone who wants to understand modern-day Italy. It is an account of the author's three-year journey around the peninsula. His first impressions of Italy as a land of pastoral bliss are soon dispelled. From the terrorism trials of the Slaughter Commission to the corruption and scandals of the football world and the sinister all-pervading influence of Berlusconi, Tobias Jones explores Italy's darker side with candour and humour.
(bwl 45 April 2008) |
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Winnie and Wolf by A N Wilson |
Winifred Wagner, an English girl married at 18 to Wagner's son Siegfried, forms an extraordinary bond with Hitler, whom she calls Wolf. The story of their unlikely friendship is narrated with deceptive plausibility by the family secretary. Wilson gives us fascinating glimpses into behind-the-scenes activity at Bayreuth where Wolf is received as storytelling uncle and opera lover. But Winnie's blindness to his real nature and to the evil he unleashes leaves one baffled and appalled.
(bwl 47 September 2008) |
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