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NCSLibrary

NCSLibrary

  • Washington, DC, USA
  • member since September 12 2007

Reviews

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Displaying 1-10 of 12 reviews
  • My Life in France
    • Rated 0 stars

    “We are all so fortunate that Julia Child went to France betwixt and between regarding her role as a diplomat’s wife and instantly fell in love with her first taste of “sole meuniere”. It opened to her (and to posterity) a new world. She began her French sojourn as the underemployed and ever-curious wife of a diplomatic officer, frustrated at being unable even to speak the language. Language classes led to cooking classes, then to partnering with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle in an American book contract. Child's devotees know the basics of this story, but the details reveal the gradual education of Child's palate, her anti-McCarthy politics, her intense love for her husband, and her boundless capacity for hard work. Although Child died before this memoir compiled from her papers reached completion, her grandnephew Alex Prud'homme proves a worthy editor. In seamlessly flowing prose, the text follows Child's growth as a cook into one of the best and most influential teachers of the twentieth century. Like Child herself, this memoir is earnest but never pedantic. Her eye for the ironic, her sense of humor, and her sharp sensitivity to the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and colors that surround her make lucid, lively reading. Read this first before you see the movie Julie & Julia.

    Compiled from various reviews by K. Craver 10/2009”

    NCSLibrary wrote this review Thursday, October 8 2009. ( reply | permalink )
  • Without a Backward Glance
    • Rated 0 stars

    “When I was living in California in the late seventies, four women left their husbands and children in my friend’s small, cul de sac neighborhood to remake themselves, return to school, or strike out on their own. Veitch's debut novel is a compelling tale of a family torn asunder by abandonment. On Christmas eve 1967, Rosemarie McDonald, a young wife and mother, walks out of her family's home near Melbourne, Australia, and never returns. Over the next 40 years, her four children maintain close relationships with one another, establishing their own families and now helping to care for their aging father, whose grasp on reality is slipping. We meet the oldest, Deborah, authoritative and controlling; charming, artistic, and charismatic James; obsessive-compulsive Robert, always responsible; and the youngest, Meredith, flighty and fearful, all plagued by their mother's abandonment. Then James, in London on business, crosses paths with Rosemarie. The balance of the novel focuses on just how and when he will reintroduce his mother to his siblings. Veitch has written a powerful and engrossing story of family interactions complete with family members' frailties and strengths. Chockablock with rich, idiomatic Australian slang, this novel includes a glossary. If you like Anita Shreve and Anne Tyler, help yourself to this gripping story by Veitch.

    Compiled from various reviews by K. Craver 10/2009”

    NCSLibrary wrote this review Thursday, October 8 2009. ( reply | permalink )
  • Death With Interruptions
    • Rated 0 stars

    “Death never sleeps, but in Saramago's world there is the possibility that she might decide to try. As in his masterpiece, "Blindness", the 1998 Nobel Prize winner begins by altering an immutable aspect of the human condition: for seven months in an unnamed country, beginning on New Year's Day, people cease to die. Funeral homes transition to burying domestic animals, the local "maphia" profits from the illegal transport of ailing citizens across the border into countries where death still functions, and economists publish alarming articles about "permanent disability pensions." Though the novel finds the right balance between the absurd and the profound, it is saved from sinking beneath an excess of cleverness only by the emergence of a memorable protagonist 100 pages in. This is death herself, elegant and in love (she prefers a lowercase "d"), who, in a letter written on violet-colored stationery, explains the reasons for her disappearance. One of our greatest living writers, Saramago continues to produce stimulating and multifaceted work well into his eighties.”

    NCSLibrary wrote this review Thursday, October 8 2009. ( reply | permalink )
  • The Shadow of Sirius
    • Rated 0 stars

    “In 2009 Merwin won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for this beautiful volume of poems . Wisely, without bitterness, these poems capture that essential stillness. In his best book in a decade and one of the best outright Merwin points his oracular, unpunctuated poems toward his own past, admitting, “I have only what I remember”, and offering what may be his most personal, generous and empathic collection. Somehow, he manages to dissolve the boundaries between one time and another, seeming to look forward to the past or remember what has yet to happen, as in a recollection of traveling to Europe by boat and seeing a warship I recognized/ from a model of it I had made/ when I was a child/ and beyond it/ there was a road down the cliff/ that I would descend some years later/ and recognize it/ there we were all together/ one time. The poems show the marks of having weathered ...the complete course/ of life, but also feel fresh and awake with a simplicity that can only be called wisdom: the morning is too/ beautiful to be anything else. Gorgeous poems about enduring love melt time as well, looking toward a moment when we will be no older than we ever were. These are among Merwins best poems, because, as he says, it is the late poems/ that are made of words/ that have come the whole way/ they have been there. Two of Merwin’s poems will be the subject for discussion during the October Faculty/Staff Poetry Circle meeting.

    Compiled from various reviews by K. Craver 10/2009”

    NCSLibrary wrote this review Thursday, October 8 2009. ( reply | permalink )
  • Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda
    • Rated 0 stars

    “Formerly an ABC News reporter in Afghanistan, Peters has delved deeply into that country’s forgotten corners, conducting in-depth research and an impressive range of interviews. After the Bush administration neglected Afghanistan in favor of war with Iraq, she writes," It was the perfect soil for an insurgency and a criminal economy to take root and flourish." The Pentagon, NATO and the international aid community all fumbled the drugs issues. Now, as a result, "UN officials estimate the Taliban and the smugglers they work with have stockpiled as much as 8,000 tons of opium—enough to supply the world’s heroin addicts for two years." Peters argues that the Afghan insurgency has followed the pattern established by Columbia’s FARC: Drug profits increase the rebels’ arsenal and viciousness, and eventually protecting their drug business takes precedence over ideological purity. The same pattern is apparent in European terror cells—in 2004, the Madrid plotters financed their operation through the sale of Ecstasy and hashish. In Afghanistan, the situation is complicated by a reluctance to acknowledge the problem that long predates al-Qaeda, as confirmed by Peters’ interviews with CIA and DEA personnel who gingerly monitored the situation in the waning years of Soviet occupation, when no one wanted to admit the mujahideen were increasingly involved in trafficking. More recently, the opium trade has been central to the Taliban’s resurgence, as a smuggler acknowledged to Peters:"They bought low, they sold high." The author quotes intelligence sources who worryingly claim that al-Qaeda operatives are accompanying large drug shipments in the Arabian Sea. She also provides valuable background, explaining the complex money-laundering methods used by these outlaws and identifying the largest smuggler in Southeast Asia (currently in American custody), who served as an intelligence source while doing business simultaneously with the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

    Compiled from various reviews by K. Craver 10/2009”

    NCSLibrary wrote this review Thursday, October 8 2009. ( reply | permalink )
  • The Lost Symbol
    • Rated 0 stars

    “With a first printing of five million copies, The Lost Symbol is off to a super-hyped start. Situated in Washington, DC with multiple mentions of National Cathedral, you’ll at least need a good synopsis to talk it over with your friends. Here in a nutshell is the “perils of Pauline” plot replete with a super-sized tattooed monk as the villain, Malakh. Robert Langdon, the symbologist hero of The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, is lured to Washington, D.C., where he believes he is to give a speech. Instead, he finds that an old friend has been abducted. Only Langdon can unlock the hidden mysteries that can save his friend’s life. Brown combines Freemasons, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Albrecht Durer, and various other ingredients to create a story that could be mishmash but never quite loses cohesiveness. This author knows how to put together an intriguing and emotionally involving, story: he keeps the reader guessing with his riddles and puzzles, and moving through the story in a cantering, orderly fashion. Without the usual violence that characterizes so many other titles in this genre, Brown’s book is a definite hit for young adult book clubs too.

    Compiled from various reviews by K. Craver 10/2009”

    NCSLibrary wrote this review Thursday, October 8 2009. ( reply | permalink )
  • The Spies of Warsaw
    • Rated 0 stars

    “Furst's latest novel is sure to be counted as one of the very best of the historical espionage genre. Literate, admirably plotted, and featuring a memorable protagonist, it is realistic and sad, but hopeful and romantic. A highly competent French army officer, Jean-François Mercier is assigned in 1937 to military attaché duty in Warsaw, a position recognized by all as an opportunity, if not a duty, to engage in spying. Mercier is a World War I combat-wounded hero, a widower whose behavior reveals a nobility and a sense of honor mostly lacking in today's fiction heroes. Using Polish and German agents, he engages in thrilling derring-do and soon recognizes the sinister intentions of the Nazis, which the French high command apparently chooses to ignore. He does his best to alert the French General Staff, especially as to German invasion strategy. Furst brilliantly captures the setting, along with the cynicism of the Warsaw sociopolitical scene. His presentation of Mercier's romantic interludes with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage is sophisticated, elegant, and discreet. If you have never read this author who is known as the thinking-person’s thriller writer, you’re in for a treat. This is his best yet.

    Compiled from various reviews by K. Craver 10/2009”

    NCSLibrary wrote this review Thursday, October 8 2009. ( reply | permalink )
  • The Collaborator of Bethlehem: An Omar Yussef Mystery (Omar Yussef Mysteries)
    • Rated 0 stars

    “Freedom fighters must always need to be on guard against the criminal element within their rank and file. This novel realistically explores the dark side of the Palestinian cause by depicting a city held hostage to thugs disguising themselves as patriots. In this outstanding debut, Rees, formerly the Jerusalem bureau chief for "Time" magazine and author of "Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East", presents modern-day Bethlehem, an ancient city of tremendous historical and religious significance, torn apart by constant attacks and reprisals between Israelis and Palestinians. Even the police chief is a former terrorist, now so sodden with drink that he is seemingly unable or unwilling to stand up to daily violence and corruption spawned by the Martyrs Brigade, a gang of thugs who are the city's de-facto rulers. Enter Omar Yussef, a longtime schoolteacher now at a UN school for refugees, perhaps the last man of conscience in the war-weary city. When a favorite ex-student, a Christian Palestinian, is arrested and charged with collaborating with the Israelis, Yussef must investigate to save his life, even if it means endangering his own. Yussef is a compelling hero with a strong moral core; despite his advanced age and infirmity, he doggedly pursues justice. Evoking a strong sense of place, this nontraditional mystery is bleak, philosophical, and powerful.

    Compiled from various reviews by K. Craver 10/2009”

    NCSLibrary wrote this review Thursday, October 8 2009. ( reply | permalink )
  • Year of Wonders
    • Rated 0 stars

    “Given two recent threats of deadly pandemics in the form of the SARS virus and the present H1 N1 virus, perhaps this realistic story of an English village and it’s courageous attempt to stop the plague from spreading rings especially true.. England was struck by a plague outbreak in 1665-66. Particularly hard hit during the epidemic was the Derbyshire village of Eyam, whose story is told here. The plague traveled to Eyam in a bundle of cloth. The unfortunate recipient, a tailor, becomes the first to die in an epidemic that leaves the village shrunk to one-third of its former population. What makes the tale of Eyam remarkable is that the citizens, led by their pastor, agreed to impose a quarantine on themselves in order to stop the plague from spreading. The usual response to news of plague in early modern Europe was flight, for there was no cure and death was almost certain. Brooks tells the story of Eyam's heroic battle from the perspective of young Anna Frith, servant to the pastor and his wife. Widowed before the epidemic, Anna is the mother of two small children and landlady to the unfortunate tailor. She nurses her friends and family to little avail during the horrors of the plague year, but her spirit remains unbroken. Like Eyam itself, Anna prevails and lives to see another day.

    Compiled from various reviews by K. Craver 10/2009”

    NCSLibrary wrote this review Thursday, October 8 2009. ( reply | permalink )
  • Pictures at an Exhibition
    • Rated 0 stars

    “If you need a bit of sugar-coated art history, this novel might be for you. It’s filled with accurate references to painters, artworks, the back room negotiations among dealers, and the staging of gallery openings. All of it is set against the backdrop of WWII and what is now called “The Rape of Europa” by the Nazis. Between the wars, Daniel Berenzon was one of the most successful gallery owners in Paris, numbering Picasso and Matisse among his clients. His son Max, is the victim of his father’s success. In 1939, the 19-year-old hopes to join his father in the business, but Daniel says no. The pampered youth, though knowledgeable, is not hungry enough, and he hires the beautiful young Rose Clement, a Louvre curator, as his latest apprentice. Max yearns for his father’s approval and Rose’s love, but to no avail. While the Berenzons, assimilated Jews, are being sheltered by a Protestant farmer in central France, she remains in Paris and strives heroically to offset the Germans’ looting by maintaining a registry of lost art. Houghteling has immersed herself in the history of the period, and her love of these paintings shines through. Back in liberated Paris in 1944, Max sets his heart on tracking down his father’s paintings, all lost; his hopes are constantly dashed, but his search is exciting and the author is finely attuned to the dealers’ folkways, their sophistication sometimes masking collaboration with the enemy and outright thievery. It is not only the paintings that have gone missing; so too have thousands of deported Jews. Max is sheltered by a friendly Hasid, an Auschwitz survivor, and they both try to track down loved ones until they come to terms with what they have lost.

    Compiled from various reviews by K. Craver 10/2009”

    NCSLibrary wrote this review Thursday, October 8 2009. ( reply | permalink )
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