Helpful votes received on reviews:
93% (43 of 46)
Location: Brooklyn, NY
In My Own Words:
With three decades of marketing and production experience in the book publishing industry and a Masters degree in medieval history, I enjoy reading a variety of books: fiction (especially nineteenth-century Victorian novels, American realist fiction, and foreign-language novels in translation); religious history; historical surveys; biographies; overviews on physics, astronomy, and biology; and--m… Read moreWith three decades of marketing and production experience in the book publishing industry and a Masters degree in medieval history, I enjoy reading a variety of books: fiction (especially nineteenth-century Victorian novels, American realist fiction, and foreign-language novels in translation); religious history; historical surveys; biographies; overviews on physics, astronomy, and biology; and--my guilty pleasure--science fiction and fantasy.
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Reviews
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Here's a story many readers would love: on the outskirts of Hiroshima, members of the victorious Allied forces look for love, for redemption, for recovery. A 17-year-old girl, caring for her terminally ill brother, and a much older British veteran, finishing his research for a book on Asia, fall in love amidst the ruins. The (still chaste) couple are then separated by her "evil" parents and they (more or less) wander the earth hoping to be reunited. And I did love the story; it's about as old-fashioned a romance as you can find these days. But the author's prose threatens to swamp an otherwise insightful, magical book. The New York Times reviewer is kind, noting that although… Read more
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
This odd, clever, scathingly bitter satire seems a patchwork of various pieces of fiction--and, as its history attests, it is. A little over halfway through the novel, "A Handful of Dust" veers, rather unexpectedly, from a bitter reflection on an unfaithful wife and her upper-crust coconspirators to a Conradian parody of explorers in the Brazilian wilderness. To explain this incongruity, The Everyman's Library edition of this fascinating work features a must-read introduction by William Boyd, but (as such introductions often do), it contains so many "spoilers" that readers are warned to wait until afterwards to peruse it. Boyd's essay does, however, summarize two salient aspects of the… Read more
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A great fan both of Doris Lessing and of science fiction, I have no idea how the publication of this book escaped my attention: it's a marvel. Lessing has visited the future before, in her five-volume Canopus in Argos series, but this book bears little resemblance to her earlier opus. Sporting less philosophy and more "adventure" (and not as challenging to read as many of Lessing's books), the novel seems aimed at a broader audience; I even suspect she may have written this story with the "young adult" market in mind. Set in Africa thousands of years in the future, after cataclysmic events have destroyed civilization and towards the end of a new Ice Age, the novel… Read more
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