Creating, collecting, and sharing thoughts and ideas. And learning along the way.
Books I’ve read or half-read, or listened to on CD, and the reviews I’ve written following that. And other miscellania about books.
I’m back to M. Amis, and have just finished with his Heavy Water and Other Stories, a collection of nine short stories; each one unique and a prize to itself.
Bravo, Amis! I can’t put you down when I pick you up.
Steve Martin is a class-act and he offers this slim autobiography in the most unaffected manner– sincere and charming all the way.
You can’t but help love the guy. Funny all the way!
A slim read, this Martin Amis book bears a shade of noir so dark that the story line is not just depressing and unsavory, but plain revolting at times.
The sheer futility of it all! The uncertainty of it all! The deceit of it all! Save me from myself!
Amis is brilliant as always, but I didn’t care for the story itself and its themes of pedophilia, pornography, the English monarchy and aerodynamics.
Martin Amis is a giant of words. To say simply that he is brilliant with this memoir-cum-historical account of the former USSR is to pay him the least of compliments; to say he has created an absolutely unforgettable work in his analysis of Stalin and the great Soviet experiment that was a miserable failure is perhaps telling the truth like it is.
With skill and daring, he recounts the genesis of Bolshevism at the start of the twentieth century to the legacy of Lenin and Stalin’s communist police state that brutalized and eliminated over the course of four decades more than twenty million lives—unfortunately all but forgotten (juxtapose this with the six million of the Holocaust).
Koba (Stalin) the Dread opens the eyes and forces us to peer through his strange kaleidoscope of unreason created by way of his socialist philosophies, and in whose name are committed innumerable crimes against humanity: the gulags, the forced famines, and the pure unadulterated terror that were as recent as the late 1950s.
And the role of laughter as an escapist defense mechanism in these times is one that can perhaps only be understood if one were there—either as a perpetrator or a victim. This book: highly recommended to anyone with a conscience.
A quick read that is a poignant account of one man’s journey through life’s ups and downs. And a beautiful tribute to his mother.
Captures all the universal themes of love, betrayal, deceit, desperation, and the ever-pressing emotion of wanting to please the parent who deserves it the least.
