Mini Book Reviews
In lieu of a real post, here are some recent books I have read and my opinions about them:
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris. I’m not sure a biography can get better than this. It helps that TR was an extraordinary individual and a wonderful patriot. This book starts at Teddy’s birth and ends just as he was going to be president. The only bad thing about this book is it’s daunting size, but it never gets boring.
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose . Another great nonfiction book. Ambrose following Meriwether Lewis and Thomas Jefferson up to and including the great Lewis and Clark Expedition and then Lewis’ years afterwards. I hadn’t read an Ambrose book before, and it was a very good read. The beginning preparations got a little long, but once the journey started the pace really picked up. It was really an exciting adventure story, even though I knew how it was going to turn out.
The War Of The Flowers. I was highly disappointed in this one. Williams gift is world-building and he did an excellent job in this one — the land of Faerie has become an urban wasteland. And the story was good. The disappointing part was that it filled with too much brooding by the main character. It could have been half as long and twice as good. About 75% through, I figured out most of what was happening, but it was at that point where the story started dragging again. Not sure I can recommend this, unless you are into really unique fantasy worlds.
The Prestige by Christopher Priest . I really can’t say enough about this novel of rival magicians at the turn of the 20th Century. The style was unique — it’s told by reading one magician’s journal and then the other. It’s a difficult format to pull off, but Priest did a wonderful job. Of course, there is a series of twists at the end, but they make perfect sense. I haven’t seen the movie and I’m not sure it can be half as good as the book.
November 14th, 2007 at 10:49 am
Mike,
I have been reading an interesting book by Linda Perlstein. It is called Tested:One American School Struggles to Mak the Grade. It follows a mostly segregated poorer school and its struggles to keep up with No Child Left Behind even though it has been touted nationally as a success story. Some of it will make you laugh and cry. It hit home for me because the schools here struggle as well. They are also on the “bad” side of segregation as they are supposed to be the schools that poor children and minorities go to so they dont harm the “good schools” made up of mostly white, wealthier children. That is something that is barely touched upon in the book and others bring it out more and that is how after NCLB and other policies our schools are much more segregated now than they have been in the last 30-40 years. It is a well-written and engrossing book about the school and its teachers and students.