nwhyte's reviews
4413 reviews

Blind Voices by Tom Reamy

http://nhw.livejournal.com/952841.html[return][return]Blind Voices is set in the same fictional Kansas town that forms the background to several of the short stories, but it doesn't really matter for continuity purposes: a travelling freak show comes to town, and brings sex and death in its wake. Some people have described it as Bardburyesque, but I think Reamy actually does better than Bradbury in some respects - in particular, the tone of horror is more gripping where Bradbury sometimes risks becoming twee. The book was apparently not completely finished at Reamy's death, but this was not obvious to me; there's a little unevenness of pacing, but I'd put that down to it being a first novel. Gripping and memorable.

The Last Word and Other Stories by Graham Greene

http://nhw.livejournal.com/720835.html[return][return]A collection of short stories ranging from 1923 to 1990, compiled by Greene in the latter year, shortly before his death. Actually it is fairly clear why these stories have not been numbered among his more memorable works; they are mostly very short and while good illustrations of his style have little to engage the reader in terms of content.

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

http://nhw.livejournal.com/950551.html[return][return]Sorry, this just doesn't do it for me. Writing style too convoluted, characters wacky in a rather uninteresting way, plot non-existent. One or two flashes of good description among the plodding.

Eurotemps by Brian Stableford, Neil Gaiman, Liz Holliday, Graham Joyce, Jenny M. Jones, David Langford, Storm Constantine, Chris Amies, Marcus L. Rowland, Alex Stewart, Colin Greenland, Anne Gray, Molly Brown, Roz Kaveney, Tina Anghelatos

http://nhw.livejournal.com/959983.html[return][return]A collection of stories setting the UK government's Department of Paranormal Resources in a European context, apparently a sequel to an earlier collection; a British, more bureaucratic version of the Wild Cards stories. Interesting to realise that back in 1992 there was far less Europhobia around in British culture - compare the mild mocking of Brussels here with the irresponsible paranoia of the Daily Mail. Most of the stories are fairly standard stuff given the scenario; it starts with a rather good one by David Langford which I hadn't previously read, and I really enjoyed the second last, by Roz Kaveney, whose fiction I don't think I have otherwise encountered.

Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow

http://nhw.livejournal.com/695345.html[return][return]My Penguin edition described the book as "a comic novel...a hilarious, often ribald story". I confess I missed the joke; there didn't seem to me a single laugh-out-loud moment in this first-person narrative of an American who attempts to go native in Africa. Plenty of food for thought on the human condition; Henderson's moral decay is contrasted with his physical vigour, and his unfiltered deliberations on the meaning of life in general, and his own in particular, added up to a much more convincing portrait than, say, the central character in The Red Badge of Courage. I enjoyed the book. But I remain worried, not for the first time, that I have failed to grasp American humour.

In Search of the Dark Ages by Michael Wood

http://nhw.livejournal.com/833310.html[return][return]This appears to be a book-of-the-TV-series dating from 1981, revised in 1987 (my copy is a 1994 reprint). I imagine the TV series must have been reasonably interesting; sadly, for much of the book I found myself wishing for more relevant illustrations and better maps.[return][return]Wood takes a straightforward tack of structuring his narrative around nine individuals from Boadicea to William the Conqueror (not that I would really have counted either of them as belonging to the 'Dark Ages', but there you go). It doen't always work. One of the nine is the Sutton Hoo Man, and it's difficult to construct a good narrative around someone when the only thing you know for sure about him is that he is dead. And the chapter on Athelstan promised to open our eyes about him and also reveal why he has been allowed to fall into obscurity; I am afraid I found my eyes glazing rather than opening, and if there was an explicit explanation of why we never hear much about him I missed it.[return][return]However, the chapters on King Arthur, Offa and Alfred were all good. (The other two are on Eric Bloodaxe and Ethelred the Unready.) I especially enjoyed the Alfred one; I found myself musing on the history of the Danelaw, which extended much further both south and west than I had realised. As a result of Alfred's efforts it seems to have been completely incorporated into the English polity, disappearing completely as a political entity in its own right.

A Man On The Moon: The Voyages Of The Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin

http://nhw.livejournal.com/614047.html[return][return]It concentrates almost exclusively on the crews of the nine space missions that actually went as far as the moon - the six landings, the two preparatory flights, and Apollo 13, the flight that failed. (Hey, I now remember reading Henry S.F. Cooper's 1973 book, The Flight that Failed, back when I was bout 11.) This means a certain narrowness of focus - although one does also get a sense (more than from the Neil Armstrong book) of the massive numbers of people involved with the Apollo project at every stage.[return][return]It's a good narrative but without much depth. I was initially puzzled by some curious repetitions of familiar material about a third of the way in, and a little later a sudden shift of concentration to the (extensive) scientific work of the latter three moon landings, but oddly enough Library Thing gave me the crucial clue - the reason it reads a bit like three different books stuck together is precisely that it is three different books stuck together, the originals having been the story to Apollo 10, Apollos 11 to 14, and Apollos 15, 16 and 17.[return][return]The last section of the book, with its strong emphasis on the science of the Moon landings, is perhaps surprisingly the most interesting, outdoing the drama of the first landing of Apollo 11 and the crisis of Apollo 13. The politics of getting a serious scientific component into the lunar programme in the first place, and then the psychology of persuading the astronauts to take it seriously, are a rather fascinating story, with ups and downs - a down in particular for the non-scientist astronaut who was bumped off the very last lunar mission for his geologist colleague. "He told a reporter that the toughest thing he could remember doing in a long time was explaining to his kids that he wasn't going to the moon."[return][return]The politics of astronaut selection for the various missions also makes interesting reading, particularly in contrast with First Man. Chaikin, writing ten years earlier than Hansen, seems to buy Armstrong's own instistence that there were no special reasons why he was chosen as the commander of the first lunar landing; it was just his turn on the roster. This is belied by other evidence even in Chaikin's book, in that the spot had in fact been offered to another astronaut. This makes Armstrong's role a conscious choice rather than a default option; and when one considers the stronger ego of Pete Conrad, the next astronaut in line, one can see why the decision was made to stick with Armstrong. Incidentally, of the three moon landings before they got serious with the science, Armstrong appears to have done much the best job of gathering and recording moon rocks.[return][return]So yeah, a decent enough account, but I will be looking out for more.

The Lost Heart Of Asia by Colin Thubron

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1267616.html[return][return]This is a travelogue of a journey through the five Central Asian former Soviet republics in the early 1990s, shortly after the collapse of the USSR. It had been lingering on my unread books shelf for a while, but I realised that in fact I had read it shortly after it came out. In those days I was interested then in the legacy of Tamerlane and Ulugh Beg in Samarkand, which Thubron indeed describes in so far as it was there to be found. These days I am more interested in the politics, and things have moved on quite a bit in the region: the Tajik civil war, just starting when Thubron was there, has now been over for more than a decade; meanwhile we have had a revolution in Kyrgyzstan, increasing repression in Uzbekistan, the bizarre rule and death of Turkmenbashi, and most of all the War on Terror in the immediate neighbourhood. So the book now feels very out of date. There are a lot of drunken feasts, departing Russians, sweeping generalisations about the facial appearance of people from particular ethnic groups, which I began to find tiresome very quickly. I believe that Thubron did a follow-up volume to this, retracing his earlier route, quite recently but won't rush to pick it up (unless anyone strongly recommends it to me in comments).

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1055454.html[return][return]Sobel's book is a simple biography of John Harrison and his efforts to build a practical chronometer for the purpose of calculating longitude. We get a great deal about the bureaucratic politics which Harrison had to deal with, at one point invoking King George III directly on his own behalf. It is an interesting enough tale, told well; Sobel succeeds in making the 18th century personalities appear just like us.[return][return]Having said that, I was not completely satisfied. Sobel's heroic portrait of Harrison makes little reference to religion and almost none to the wider impact of the longitude question on politics and vice versa; it is 'Whiggish' in that the "solution of the greatest scientific problem of his time" is presented as both desirable and ultimately inevitable. It is entertaining enough but not especially profound.

Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin

http://www.livejournal.com/community/bibliophilia/77522.html[return][return]This book richly deserves all the praise it has received. I was aware that Pepys was a senior naval civil servant who dabbled in science (he was President of the Royal Society when it published Newton's Principia so his name is on the title page) and famously kept a secret diary. (The Secret Diary of Samuel Pepys, aged 26-35???) But Tomalin makes him really come alive. [return][return]The early period, when Pepys witnessed civil war in the streets of London, and truanted from school to watch King Charles I's head being cut off, is superbly depicted, as is the story of how he used distant family connections to climb away from his humble origins (his father was a tailor, his mother a laundrywoman). Then we follow him through the uncertain times of Cromwell, a hasty (and ultimately childless) marriage to a fourteen-year-old bride, and then the dramatic year of 1660, when suddenly everything goes right for him; he starts keeping a diary on January 1st and within a few weeks he is chatting to Charles II on the boat bringing him back to England to retake the throne.[return][return]For the 1660s, of course, Tomalin is helped by the existence of Pepys' diary. The political stuff is fascinating, and as an aspirant on that career path myself I would make this compulsory reading for all young wannabee statesman. Among other jewels, Pepys is the man who tells the King that the Great Fire of London has broken out in 1666. And he intermingles love, politics, mistresses, religion, illness, friendship into what can rapidly become an addictive combination. The diary lay hidden in plain view in Magdalen College Cambridge for a century and a half after his death before it was decoded; a full version, leaving in all the naughty bits, wasn't published until the 1970s.[return][return]The post-1669 story is inevitably a bit flatter, because mostly gained from secondary sources. (Pepys stopped keeping a diary because he was worried that he was losing his sight, though in fact he had no real problems with it in the remaining thirty-four years of his life.) Even so, he gets elected to Parliament, imprisoned in the Tower of London, demolishes the British naval base at Tangier in Morocco, publishes Newton's Principia and rapidly acquires a new permanent lady friend after his wife dies. Tomalin leaves us with a sympathetic but honest portrait of a man who saw his entire world (a world which actually didn't extend very far out of London) change in his lifetime, and left us a unique chronicle of what he thought about it. Strongly recommended, to anyone who likes a good story.