Awix (3310 KP) rated When the Tripods Came (The Tripods #4) in Books
Sep 18, 2019
A bit dated, but that's the least of the book's issues. A prequel to the main series was really not required, and the main catalyst for writing it seems to have been the Tripods TV show which was broadcast three or four years earlier. (The TV show the Masters use to take over the world bears a suspicious resemblance to the TV adaptation of the first two books.) It's not really meta, more sort of peeved: peeved at critics of the show's shortcomings, but also peeved at the makers of the show for not doing a better job. As well as being dated, the relationship subplots of the book feel a bit proforma, but the depiction of the world slowly sliding out of human control and the end of modern civilisation is vividly presented in the usual compelling fashion. Whether it should all feel a bit more downbeat and bleak is probably a question of personal taste; Christopher's prose retains its good manners as well as its readability.
A Christian Guide to Environmental Issues: Connecting Bible Insights with Contemporary Challenges
Margot Hodson and Martin Hodson
Book
Environmental sustainability is a major issue in society today. While Christian response was...
Conceptual Innovation in Environmental Policy
James Meadowcroft and Daniel J. Fiorino
Book
Concepts are thought categories through which we apprehend the world; they enable, but also...
Running: A Novel
Book
From the critically acclaimed author of Be Safe I Love You comes a dark and breathtaking novel of...
essays social issues
The Geek Who Came From The Cold: Surviving the Post - USSR Era on a Hollywood Diet
8.0
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When the first wave of pirated videotapes from the west reached the USSR in the second half of the...
The Great Believers
10.0
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“A page turner...An absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it’s like to live during...
Historical Fiction
B is for Burglar (Kinsey Millhone, #2)
8.1
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Although business has been slow lately for P.I. Kinsey Millhone, she's reluctant to take on the case...
Kinsey Millhone 1980s
The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah: The Autobiography
10.0
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Benjamin Zephaniah, who has travelled the world for his art and his humanitarianism, now tells the...
Autobiography
Suswatibasu (1701 KP) rated A Kind of Freedom: A Novel in Books
Nov 6, 2017 (Updated Nov 6, 2017)
In A Kind of Freedom, Sexton pursues a family’s history in a downward spiral, with three alternating plot lines that echo one another along the way. It begins with the budding love of Evelyn, brought up in New Orleans and the daughter of a Creole mother and black doctor father. She is courted by Renard, a poor man who works menial jobs to get by but aspires to study medicine. Their courtship reveals the strictures of a class- and colour-driven society that suffocates ambition and distorts desire.
The second generation is about Jackie, a single mother in 1980s New Orleans who is in love with her child’s father but afraid he will succumb to his crack addiction.
Eventually, we get to know Jackie’s son, T.C., in 2010, a young man at a turning point in his life. Through T.C.'s eyes, Sexton portrays a post-Katrina New Orleans where the smell of mold still lingers and opportunities for fast cash in the streets abound, as do the chances of getting shot or arrested.
It's an unflinching portrayal, slightly detached and not overbearing in its rhetoric. It shows where links have been bruised and sometimes broken, but dwells on the endurance and not the damage. A moving read.
The Most Wanted Man in China
Book
Fang Lizhi was one of the most prominent scientists of the People's Republic of China; he worked on...