Barry Cunningham
A little lame actually.
The first thing I note is that Einstein had discredited and abandoned the idea of the luminiferous ether several years before this book was written. Even though not all scientists had gotten that memo by 1913, that Doyle premises his story on its existence indicates that science is not going to be a strong point in the story, though it is consistent with Doyle's “spiritualist” world view at the time which does bleed through into the story.
The opening chapter, where everyone is behaving a little peculiarly, is a particularly heavy handed foreshadowing of the crisis to come.
The last chapter retcons the global catastrophe, reminiscent of more recent films that feature similar annoying mulligans (I'm thinking of the Avengers and Superman), one can see coming from the structure of the narration: our reporter protagonist must have an audience in the end.
First, the description of this book that I see for the Kindle edition is wrong. It describes another entirely different novel by Ben Elton. The novel by James Hilton tells the story of the life of a fictional English diplomat, Charles Anderson, born in 1900. The only time travel involved is memory. The story is told in a present narrative, giving way to four flashbacks. Hilton's treatment of memory in this book is not quite as engaging as he treatment in [b:Goodbye Mr. Chips 2141948 Goodbye Mr. Chips James Hilton https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348024958l/2141948.SY75.jpg 2147442], but there is a lot more action in a more complicated world.An engaging read. It had to be. The Kindle edition I read had hundreds of typographical errors. Most were capitalization errors. Lots of sentences without capitalization. Lots of words with a terminal “i” capitalized (e.g., “taxI”). Accented characters in foreign word replaced by blanks. Very aggravating.
Saw R. Austin Freeman referred to in [b:Goodbye, Mr. Chips 58657561 Goodbye, Mr. Chips James Hilton https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1627587012l/58657561.SY75.jpg 2147442] as one of “Mr. Chips” favorite mystery authors.I can't say that I was very impressed. The “mystery” was pretty transparent from the start. Not much of a mystery at all. Seems a little wooden after all, with fairly stilted dialog. The effort at the end to pass itself off as a romance is really rather lame.
I grew up in Hollywood, so the local color of Hollywood in early 1930s was interesting and nostalgic. However, it runs into problems using actual historical people as characters when their actions as character diverge too far from what we know about the actual historical figures.
For instance, I found it hard to get engaged with the mystery of where Alla Nazimova "disappeared" to at a period in her life when she was starring on the Broadway stage in New York. It didn't help that she was "found" living with Dorothy Arzner when we know she was living with Glesca Marshall at that time.
To me it read like a contemporary young adult sitcom set in 1930s Hollywood. Some episodes were rather transparent treatments of contemporary social issues transplanted into that milieu.
Fairly fast-paced and readable, it is fairly light-weight. The blurb at the end of the book teasing the first chapter of the next book in the series seemed like a fairly wooden exposition for season 2 to me. Can't say it made me want to rush right out and buy it or borrow it from the library.
Ultimately, a children's book.
Designed to be inspiring, it is well written and engaging, with a certain charm. It certainly is very short. I read it in 2-3 hours.
However, I haven't been a young adult since well before this book was written. I found the magical thinking and God mambo-jumbo to be a bit wearing. The final well-signaled plot twist would probably have seemed more profound if I were younger and it were more novel to me.
Then there is the point that finding a chest full of gold on somebody else's property in Spain at almost any point in time over the past 200 years is going to involve more than a little litigation, taxation, or bribery. Not completely happily-ever-after.
The setting in time is more than a little confusing. Obviously trying to achieve a certain sort of timeless vibe, there is a conspicuous absence of technology. No trains, planes, or automobiles. No telephone or telegraph. Only revolvers and rifles. I think it is supposed to seem 19th century. That makes the Englishman's interest in alchemy just barely plausible. But then the absence of colonial powers in North Africa, save for one Englishman, seems bizarre. The combatants in the wars in the region are conspicuously unidentified. There is a reference to an unidentified book whose beginning seems somewhat like Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, but, seeing as this would place the timeline firmly and implausibly in the Franco era, it just further confuses the setting in time for me.
Enjoyed it a lot. The 4 stars is because it is really just half a book. [b:Stella Maris 60526802 Stella Maris (The Passenger, #2) Cormac McCarthy https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1658241766l/60526802.SX50.jpg 95478000] is the other half. The end is not the end. Lots of stuff unresolved. He just lifted his foot off the gas, pushed in the clutch, and is changing gears (books).McCarthy's writing style poses a few problems until you get used to it: lack of quotes (occasionally confusing, but no worse than Austen or Joyce), idiosyncratic apostrophization (contractions, foreign words), shifting stream of consciousness (a little confusing during when encountering first hallucinations, but you figure out the pattern), shifting timeline, large history of science and math info dumps (I rather enjoyed these actually since I was already familiar the subjects and there were no cringe worthy errors that I find all too common with other authors).Characters were weird but engaging. Language and view verging on poetic. There is a mystery involved, which is left hanging at the end of this volume. (Hence the “half a book” comment.) But I wonder if the mystery is not really the point, similar to the “mystery” in [b:The Brothers Karamazov 4934 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1427728126l/4934.SX50.jpg 3393910].
I rated this as 3-stars simply because I am not really in the target audience of 21st century middle-grade or young adults.
I read it with interest because the author is a high school classmate; he helped organize our very successful high school class 50th reunion in 2016. I was not at all close to him in high school and I knew our life experiences were very different, but I was interested learning in his experiences during our school years in Southern California and our formative young adult years in the 1960s and 1970s.
Peter relates a series of stories from his life growing up, analyzing the lessons he learned from them. He urges young readers to analyze what similar experiences they may have had and what coping strategies they may have available to them.
Although Peter and I went to the same high school at the same time, we inhabited very different worlds at the time. He had a car and liked to spend most of his time at the beach, 20 miles away, surfing. I grew up with my father, without a car in our household, let alone a car of my own. By nature, I was much more academically inclined. I was more likely to be reading about math and science or busing to the downtown library to browse the literature room, first for 20th century poetry, then for foreign literature (think haiku, Noh drama, Rabelais, Kafka, philology) that excited my fancy as I wandered around.
Nevertheless, the experiences Peter relates, particularly how he explores them, are fairly universal in nature. He stresses that universality in teasing out the lessons he has learned. In that sense we have shared a lot of the same experiences. And, since we experienced them in the same time periods, I can relate to them in a way that is probably closer to his experience than that of 21st century young adults.
Peter has spent a lot more time teaching young people over the past half century than I have. I'm sure his presentation is a lot better adapted to his intended audience than to his grizzled old classmate.
I am grateful that Peter has shared his experiences so thoughtfully and with such a kind and loving heart.
(I read this in the original PDF version issue by the January 6 Committee. In that version, the notes were not easy to navigate on my Kindle readers. Simple automated conversion to Kindle format made the formatting worse. I am also reading the Harper edition with the forward by Ari Melber that was delivered today (12/30/2022)).
An important document in contemporary American history. It thoroughly and meticulously documents the actions and events that led up to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the events of the day itself, and subsequent events.
It is scathing.
I did not find it an easy book to read. I did not find the heavily annotated text so difficult, although, technically I suppose it was. What I found difficult seeing the depravity of the GOP, the Trump administration, and the right-wing extremists who planned and carried out the attack. The meticulous documentation of their ceaseless lies and abuses of power made for both a depressing and angry read.
One hopes that the Department of Justice indictments will be forthcoming in the new year. Besides Trump and his inner circle that plotted the insurrection, more than a few of the new House committee chairs deserve to be behind bars with their ground troops for seditious conspiracy for their roles supporting the January 6 coup attempt.
A book I've been meaning to read since junior high school. Perhaps it might have been better in junior high school.
It starts out kind of slow, and I had some annoyances in Orczy's style. The main plot in fact is somewhat preposterous: British aristocrats saving French aristocrats.
The first major reveal happens about halfway through the book. But, it is hard to imagine that it could come as a surprise to anyone over the age of twelve. The title and the first chapter are about a male superhero. Then we spend umpteen chapters following a woman around. Why is that? What is the connection?
Finally the pace picks up and we have some real action. This bit is better paced, which is probably why it seems better written. Eventually it even culminates in the 18th century shanks' mare equivalent of a car chase, reminiscent of Kidnapped or John Buchan chases through the gorse. However the disguises wouldn't fool anyone who has read a few Doc Savages or is over the age of twelve.
So am I glad that I read it after all these years? Yes.
Do I wish that I had read it earlier? Yes, but not because I feel like I was missing some part of my education by not reading it. It's more like I think I might have enjoyed it more if I were more naive.
Billing Northanger Abbey as a gothic parody overstates the case. It does not parody gothic romances in anything like the same sense that Don Quixote parodies chivalric romances. At best, the device of constantly shooting down the naive heroine's gothic fantasies lifts the book to the level of sufferably puerile.
(Actual edition read was that contained in the Complete Works of Jane Austen published by Delphi Classics.)
An interesting covert street photography exhibit of pictures taken on the New York subway in 1938, 1940, and 1941.
Nowadays, with our smartphones and small high-ISO P&S cameras, taking such photos is not much of a technical challenge. It's easy to overlook just how hard this was to do with a 35mm Contax beneath one's winter coat with a bulb release routed down the sleeve. But the pictures are a remarkable time capsule of some of life's unguarded, boring moments. Ordinary then. Gone now. Brutally forgotten otherwise.
Valerie Boyd's was complemented Hurston's memoir Dust Tracks on a Road well. The memoir gives Hurston's voice and vision, but maintains certain fictions about her life (e.g., her age) and has some notable lacunae, results of its time of writing, what Hurston wanted to reveal, and her publisher's ham-handed editing of an outspoken black author to make her palatable for Jim Crow America. Boyd does a good job reconciling Hurston's memoir to her real life.
The scope of Boyd's biography necessarily far exceeds that of Dust Tracks, covering Hurston's family history, her marriages, background on her friends, the Harlem Renaissance, and her later life.
A sensitive examination of the life of this unique and important American voice.
Engaging and funny, but very shallow, it could be called Lifestyles of the Vain and Venal.
This is mostly a book about palace intrigue, undoubtedly spun by one of the Trump administration's spin masters for her own purposes. In her own words, The Apprentice: White House Edition. Rich in anecdotes about who said what about whom when and who elbowed their way in front of the cameras when; poor in any analysis of the policies she claims to have been vehemently defending.
There is some self-reflection, but the passages of self loathing in the book hardly seem adequate to atone for her role as an apologist for the many crimes and acts of cruelty perpetrated by the administration she represented.
