Number of positive reviews: six (poor Josef Skvorecky)
Number of positive reviews that manage to make the book sound awful: five (exception: Paul Quarrington on hockey books)
You-lost-me-at-hello openings:
Margaret Thatcher was the greatest reformer in Argentinean history [ed. note - that's actually a pretty good line]; and it could hardly have escaped the notice of anyone who met her that she was, or had made herself, a most formidable figure. Indeed, she seems almost the last politician on the world stage to have had any object in view other than the achievement of personal power. [wha with the what now?]Ah yes -- Daniels, Craig Daniels.
This is Wally Lamb's first novel in nine years and, even if you suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome and have a hard time holding it, I guarantee you won't be able to put it down. Lamb's first two novels, I Know This Much Is True and She's Come Undone, were Oprah picks, and this one doesn't disappoint. [Why do you keep threatening me?]
It's easy to distrust a book whose first chapter is mainly press clippings. Fortunately .... [Fortunately it's about a really interesting parrot, so who cares about the writing!]
James Bond never was a man of many words, and nor is this book. With a text limited to a foreword, captions and an interview of actor Craig Daniels by the author-photographer, the rest is a visual treat of hundreds of pictures.
6 comments:
Ugh. Do they manage to make the Skvorecky one sound good by any chance? Seems only fair.
Noo, not really, though it was suitably deferential. It sounds like a kinda weak follow-up to Engineer of Human Souls. I keep meaning to reread that (it has the best grading scene of any novel, for one thing), and I suppose it might be worth moving on to the new one afterwards.
On a purely trivial note, it may amuse the good Dr B and her readership to know that, in the lamentable public institution in which her loyal reader slaves for a living, difficult (read: weird and threatening) patrons are known as "Wally Lambs" - an attribution linked to one of the author's previous novels, in which a protagonist creates a terrible, Seneca-worthy scene in a library.
Or so the Threadkiller is told. Admittedly she cannot tell you which Wally Lamb novel because she has not read any of them. She thinks it may be "I know this much is true" (only because she has fond memories of the same line from a Spandau Ballet song from her teen years) but she means to find the book in question and read it as soon as possible. Really.
I'm too sad about the state of newspapers to trash them, I'm afraid. The LA Times used to be a great, if tedious, paper. Then it was sold to Tribune, an OK newspaper company. That, in turn, was sold to a real estate developer. The Times is shedding staff and column inches like crazy. But it probably won't be enough. Now Tribune Co. is on the verge of bankruptcy.
Sorry, I meant something more like "examine them critically." As in, I'm so sad about the way my own is crashing financially that anything good strikes me a blessing. I don't at all mean that you're engaged in trashing the g n' m.
Re Wally Lamb, the book with the gruesome library scene (it involves auto-amputation) is indeed "I Know This Much is True". Because I am essentially middlebrow, I have read many of Oprah's picks, and they range from surprisingly good (The Corrections) to just awful (any one of many novels about young girls coming of age in hardscrabble Appalachia, featuring abusive relatives and wise mother-substitutes).
Did anyone else think the first sentence of the James Bond review was funny? The one about how the book is not a man of many words?
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