Jaded British journalist Thomas Fowler has been covering the conflict for some time when he is befriended by an American, Alden Pyle, who arrives in the country purportedly to provide economic aid but is involved in CIA undercover work. The novel takes place in Vietnam when colonial power France was fighting communist-led forces from the country's north. You have to get past that to recognize also what a wonderfully written novel The Quiet American is-as well as, perhaps, where Greene went wrong. foreign policy and military power were still widely seen as forces to make the world safe for democracy, here was a slender novel that predicted and explained the quagmire America was about to find itself in.Īt least, that's the way it seems for anyone who reads the book in the years since the bloody Southeast Asian debacle of the sixties and seventies. In the 1950s, when Vietnam wasn't yet on the radar for most Western readers, when U.S. The biggest obstacle to properly appreciating The Quiet American is getting past Graham Greene's uncanny political prescience. CRITIQUE The unquiet Brit and the Americans
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had finished a script by, as noted in that day’s NYT however, he was replaced by children’s author Roald Dahl the following year. Later figures in the DV and NYT cited a final budget of $10 million, and $12 million, respectively. The DV stated that United Artists (UA) would back the picture, then budgeted at $8 million, according to an DV item. Broccoli was initially uninterested in adapting the book, but changed his mind after the tremendous success of the children’s musical comedy Mary Poppins (1964, see entry). Fleming, who died the year the book was published, had based the work on bedtime stories he had made up for his son, Caspar, involving a magical car named after Count Louis Zborowski’s 1920s racing car, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” According to a NYT article, Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, known for co-producing the James Bond series of motion pictures based on Ian Fleming’s novels, planned to produce a film adaptation of Fleming’s 1964 children’s novel, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. That doesn’t mean a book wasn’t decent, and it doesn’t mean all unrated ones are secret 1-stars. So, if I can’t give a book at least 4 stars, I won’t rate it at all. As an author, I know first-hand the emotional turmoil importance of ratings. My mama always told me that if you can’t say something nice about somebody, don’t say anything at all. While you’re browsing my challenge list, you can hover over a book cover to see what I’ve rated it. So, if you check out my Reading Challenge page, you’ll see a few oddballs. While I’m working my way through broadening my fantasy horizons, I’m also reading through some childhood favorites with my oldest daughter. Woo hoo!īUT, in the interest of transparency: A few of those are not from my 2018 Fantasy Reads list. If I keep up at this rate, I’m poised to meet my goal for the year. Time slip issues aside, four months have indeed passed, so it’s well past time to check in on the 2018 reading challenge. (And, in related news, have you heard the latest on Bill and Ted?) Notoriously ‘unrepresentative’ anthology of North American literary and feminist SF from 1960 to 1990. Le Guin, eds, The Norton Book of Science Fiction (1994). See also To the Resurrection Station (1986), Ring ofSwords (1993), Ordinary People (2005).īrian Attebery and Ursula K. Post-revolutionary humans and humanoid aliens face the problems of interspecies communication and colonial encounters. Satire on commodity-hedonism and nuclear anxiety.Įleanor Arnason, A Woman Of The Iron People (1991). A British muslim author, imprisoned and tortured for making a joke, hallucinates another - very resonant - world.īenjamin Appel, The Funhouse (1959). Surprisingly uncensored mediation of Central Asian tradition, Soviet modernity and the possibilities presented by an alien world.īrian Aldiss, HARM (2007). See also Woman in the Dunes (1962), The Face of Another (1964), The Ruined Map (1967), The Box Man (1973), The Ark Sakura (1984), Beyond the Curve (1991), The Kangaroo Notebook (1991).Ĭhingiz Aitmatov, The Day Lasts Longer than a Hundred Years (1980). The most overtly science-fictional of Abe’s absurdist explorations of contemporary alienation. See also Good Times (1980).Ībe Kobo, Inter Ice Age 4 (1959). Eco-saboteurs take on colluding business and government. Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975). His novel Me and Kaminski (also published in the US), about a petty journalist who hopes to become the biographer of the painter Kaminski, is a better novel than Measuring the World but not too many critics noticed this. In a review on Measuring the World Tom LeClair wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Kehlman ícan measure the woes of failing bodies and flailing minds, no small achievement for a man of 31.ë The English newspaper The Guardian wrote in an article about Kehlmann: íFor decades German fiction has enjoyed the reputation of being serious, worthy and a bit dull.ë This is a bit of an exaggeration there are even within the last few decades quite a few German authors who have not been very serious, and sometimes not even dull.īesides this, is being serious really a crime in literature? Whether serious or not, Kehlmann is hailed as the new ambassador of German literature. His historical novel Die Vermessung der Welt (published in the US by Vintage as Measuring the World) sold more than 1.4 million copies in Germany alone. Daniel Kehlmann (born in 1975) is the star of German literature. This volume features updated versions of the pedagogical student aids from prior editions, such as the chronology of Frederick Douglass’s life, questions for consideration, illustrations, selected bibliography, and index. These documents now include a letter written by Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison upon his arrival in the British Isles in 1845, just after publication of the Narrative, the first of many such public letters through which the author and orator revealed how his autobiography was received as well as how he was himself undergoing a personal transformation. Part Three features selected reviews of Douglass’s writings along with his own letters and speeches, with substantial explanatory headnotes to aid students. In this revised edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, David Blight has tightened and revised the introduction to reflect new insights gained from recent research, particularly on how much Douglass modeled his writing on Biblical rhetoric and stories and the abolitionist’s appearance as a character in many works of contemporary fiction. Would you be willing to try another one of Fiona Hardingham and Steve West ’s performances?ĭear lord, not likely. It felt like the author was cutting and pasting elements from genres I love, but there were too many of them, and they never formed a cohesive theme or a plot that felt genuine. With all these great ingredients, I kept thinking "I should really be loving this!" But it just never added up for me. This book felt like a song mashup remix of every classic fantasy series (game of thrones, wheel of time, etc) with every chosen- one-coming-of-age-in-the-face-of-great-trials YA book (hunger games, ender's game, etc) That's the main problem I had with this story, though. What other book might you compare An Ember in the Ashes to and why? There's a catastrophe or a giant twist in every chapter. then the bar is set too high in the beginning for the stakes to be raised any further. When there is too much action, adventure, love triangles, supernatural villains, big empire evil, torture, espionage, trials, rape, and so on. When a story is 15 hours long and literally JAM-PACKED with plot, that's not a good sign. I tuned out for twenty, thirty minutes at a time and every time I checked back in, I thought "yeah, doesn't seem like I missed anything important". But so is watching season 5 of scandal, even though NOTHING surprising, informative or important is happening there. Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?Įh. Too many good ingredients = Over-seasoned story In Earthman, Come Home, the nomadic cities revert to barbarism and marauding rogue cities begin to pose a threat to all civilized worlds. In A Life for the Stars, it is centuries later and antigravity generations have enabled whole cities to lift off the surface of the earth to become galactic wanderers. His battle to realize his dream results in two momentous discoveries anti-gravity and the secret of immortality. In the first novel, They Shall Have Stars, man has thoroughly explored the Solar System, yet the dream of going even further seems to have died in all but one man. Named after the migrant workers of America's Dust Bowl, these novels convey Blish's "history of the future," a brilliant and bleak look at a world where cities roam the Galaxy looking for work and a sustainable way of life. Originally published in four volumes nearlyfifty years ago, Cities in Flight brings together the famed "Okie novels" of science fiction master James Blish. She made dancing embarassing.” Opening paragraph to Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith His rationalization of his attitude was a flimsy one and didn’t fool him for a minute, though it crossed his mind every time he saw Melinda dancing: she was insufferably silly when she danced. He didn’t dance simply because his wife liked to dance. “Vic didn’t dance, but not for the reasons that most men who don’t dance give to themselves. Vic’s neighbors like him, but pity him since his wife Melinda doesn’t do much to hide her various affairs. The story opens in Little Westley, an affluent suburb where Vic Van Allen runs a boutique publishing house. Ripley, and is probably one of Highsmith’s best novels. It came out in the same decade as Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. I was curious if any of the questions brought up in the Ripley movies would apply to this film.ĭeep Water is based on Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel of the same name. By coincidence, Deep Water (directed by Adrian Lyne, starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas) came out right as I was wrapping out my blog series, so I decided to postpone my final post and look at that film. Ripley that it seemed like a good idea to look at the various films based on Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley books, since a movie based on one of her other thrillers was coming out soon. I mentioned at the start of my blog series The Cinematic Mr. The story is great, though, and King has fully redeemed himself in my eyes, as I swore I was done with him after I never finished From a Buick 8. I said “almost YA” because aside from some gory bullet wounds, it’s pretty mild horror… until the final scene where there are references to a drug kingpin and torture. (Not to be confused with the movie Commander USA used to show on Saturdays.) Actually, he does name it, it’s a deadlight, straight from It.īut mostly, like all King’s work, it’s about people, the author breathing his unique insight into characters’ thoughts and motives far more than the horrific situations he puts them in… and sometimes painfully extricates them from. James, fresh from a BBC Ghost Story for Christmas adaptation, finds its way lovingly into this narrative as the boy must undertake “The Ritual of Chud” with an unnamed thing from Hell. It’s about a new twist on an old story, as only Stephen King could accomplish. It’s about a kid who gets “borrowed”, not kidnapped, by his mother’s ex girlfriend Liz, who knows many secrets, a kid who is talking to a dead man when a revenant possesses that soul, a kid who knows there is some untold story about his father that he’s not sure he wants to hear. |