Simon & Schuster
2013
Continue reading “Review: Bad Santas and other creepy Christmas characters, by Paul Hawkins”
Category Archives: Non-fiction
My Midwinter reading
I saw a tweet from Simon and Schuster yesterday afternoon asking for reviewers. The book in question is ‘Bad Santas’ by Paul Hawkins. It arrived this afternoon.
And my next review will be
‘The Bride’ by Kacie Taylor. Ms Taylor contacted me a few weeks ago and asked if I’d be interested in reviewing her take on the ‘beauty and the beast’ fairy tale. Of course I love to read new authors and I was intrigued by the premise so I said yes. So far I’m enjoying the story. I will post a review once I’ve finished the novel.
Continue reading “And my next review will be”
Review: ‘Slavery’s Exiles; The story of the American Maroons’ by Sylviane A Diouf
New York University Press
11th February 2014
Written by a scholar of the African diaspora, Slavery’s Exiles discusses the existence or otherwise of marronage among North American slaves. The maroons of Jamaica and Suriname have been extensively studied while evidence for maroons in the US (and the North American colonies before the War of Independence) is limited. This book looks at the evidence provided not only by former slaves interviewed in the early twentieth century, but at newspaper reports, court reports and legislation from the seventeenth century onwards.
Continue reading “Review: ‘Slavery’s Exiles; The story of the American Maroons’ by Sylviane A Diouf”
Review: 100 Poems Old and New by Rudyard Kipling
Selected and Edited by Thomas Pinney
Cambridge University Press
11 December 2013
This is a collection of mostly unfamiliar poems by Rudyard Kipling, culled from a variety of sources.
Continue reading “Review: 100 Poems Old and New by Rudyard Kipling”
Two book reviews
I know I said I wasn’t reviewing any books this month because I’m concentrating on my novel but I got to 43000 words yesterday so I took some time off to finish reading an ARC I’d got from http://www.netgalley.com and another book I’d borrowed from the library. My reviews follow.
Review: ‘When Hollywood was Right: How movie stars, studio moguls and big business remade American politics’ by Donald T Critchlow
5th November 2013
Cambridge University Press
Donald Critchlow describes the history of Hollywood from a political perspective, a conservative Republican one. Hollywood hasn’t always been a liberal place; in the first half of the twentieth century the Republican party was very strong among actors and studio bosses. This is the story of the vacitudes of fate that took the Hollywood Right from repeated decline to success between the 30’s and 80’s. The political careers of key players such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Cecil B DeMille, Barry Goldwater, and supporters like John Wayne and Hedda Hopper are interwoven in this account pf the changing fortunes of the Republican party not just in Hollywood, but in California as a whole.
Review: Comets! by David J Eicher
In 1975, at the age of fourteen, David Eicher fell in love with the Universe. until then he had wanted to be a doctor, but became entranced by Comet West and has been fascinated by comets ever since. Consequently he gave up his medical aspirations and became the editor of Astronomy magazine and author of seventeen books about science and history instead. This volume was written in early 2013 in order to be available in time for the arrival at naked-eye visibility of Comet ISON later this month. Comet ISON is expected to be a ‘Great Comet’ – a particularly bright comet that will put on an impressive show for observers here on Earth.
Criminally good books
I’ve just finished reading a couple of good books:
Silent Witnesses
Nigel McCrery
and
The Burglar Caught by a Skeleton
And Other Singular Tales from the Victorian Press
Jeremy Clay
Review: ’So that others may live: A Fethulleh Gulen Reader’ Edited by Erkan M Hurt
3rd July 2013
Blue Dome Press (The Light Inc.)
This is a compilation of the Turkish scholar Fethulleh Gulan’s essays. Gulan is an incredibly influential man and his ideas are the guiding light behind a movement for peace, education and social justice – the Gulan Movement.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 