Currently Browsing: Twentieth Century
Dec 24, 2009
I seem to have read a number of books recently which filled me with various emotions – anger at injustice, sadness at the blind greed and selfishness of the human race, and rage at people who use power for their own ends, whilst trampling on anyone around them who gets in their way. When A Crocodile Eats The Sun is a memoir from the journalist, Peter Godwin who was a white who was born and grew up in...
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When A Crocodile Eats The Sun – Peter Godwin
Feb 25, 2009
The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh
The funeral business in Hollywood was cut throat in the early 1950s. Bigger, better, more glamorous – for a funeral home to really reach the pinnacle, it had to try and compete with Whispering Glades, which was truly the biggest, best and most glamorous funeral home in the whole of Hollywood. Dennis Barlow is an English rogue, trapped in the artificiality of expatriate Hollywood where he must keep... read more
Oct 16, 2008
The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front – Mark Thompson
I received The White War as an Early Reviewer on LibraryThing, and it wasn’t a disappointment. I love reading history, particularly when the period is relatively unknown and undocumented as this. As readers of this blog will know, I read Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms and wasn’t particularly enamoured with it, although that was more for the writing style than than the period of history... read more
May 6, 2008
Letters From a Lost Generation – First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends
A century ago, the art of letter writing was dominant. Correspondence formed the most effective way to communicate, and people wrote letters with the frequency that people write emails today – but perhaps with more thought, more feeling and more emotion than the technological form into which letter writing has evolved. Letters From a Lost Generation provides a heart-wrenching example of how letters... read more
Apr 23, 2008
Child 44 – Tom Rob Smith
Child 44 is Tom Rob Smith’s first novel, and it is an incredible way to launch one’s career as a suspense writer. Set in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and connected with real events, the book is intensely disturbing and totally gripping at the same time. What struck me most was how terrible the life was for every citizen of the Soviet Union under Stalin. It was like a different world and it... read more
Mar 20, 2008
A Farewell To Arms – Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms is an unusual book. The storyline is simple enough, but the style of writing took some time getting used to. This is the first Hemingway novel I had ever read so I wasn’t prepared for it, but after reading the introduction in the edition which I own, the word ‘detachment’ stood out to me. The story began and I felt like I was outside looking in. Despite being written... read more
Mar 18, 2008
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
I would hail this book as one of the most evocative accounts of the First World War ever written. I was almost speechless when I finished it. There were passages which I found myself reading a second and third time because of their beauty. The story itself is similar to so many others – a young man grows into an old man as he experiences the war. His comrades become his only family and by the end,... read more
Mar 8, 2008
A Long Long Way – Sebastian Barry
So many books written about World War I recount the misery, horror and subhuman conditions the soldiers were forced to endure on the Western Front. A Long Long Way continued this tradition, but despite having read a lot about the period, having visited the battlefields of Belgium and having studied the Great War at length, it never reduces the shock and sadness. This story is about a very ordinary Irish... read more
