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Content by Thomas Paul
Reviewer Rank: 136
Helpful Votes:
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Reviews Written by
Thomas Paul (Plainview, NY USA)
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Poetry from Euler's Identity, 16 Feb 2009
How do we develop relationships with people? What does our memory mean in these relationships? Is it possible to form a relationship with someone who can not remember that he ever met you even though you see him every day? Yoko Ogawa has written a perfect, poetic story that tries to explore these questions.
The book is written from the point of view of a woman hired to be a housekeeper for a retired math professor. The professor was in a car accident that damaged his brain, destroying his short term memory. Every day she arrives to do her job and the professor has no memory of her ever being there before. When the professor finds out that the housekeeper is a single mom with a young son, he insists that the boy come to his house every day and even though he has no memory of the invitation, the professor is thrilled to see him each day. What brings the three together is the professor's love of mathematics and his ability to share that love along with the love of baseball that they all share.
The result is a simple, beautiful story and at 180 pages, it is long enough to make you think without dragging out the story beyond its need. The author even creates poetry from discussions of prime numbers and Euler's identity. I can strongly recommend this book.
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Sweetheart
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by Chelsea Cain
Edition: Paperback |
| Price: £3.91 |
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| Availability: In stock |
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Completely unbelievable, 16 Feb 2009
A novel doesn't have to be 100% believable but if an author is going to make the story absurd, she has to at least build up to the absurdity. In this novel the author makes no effort to make any part of the story the slightest bit believable. Right from the start we get Archie who is back on the force in spite of constantly popping pain killers. Does anyone really think a man who takes four Vicodin at a time would be trusted with a gun?
===spoiler alert===
But then the whole premise of the story is ridiculous. Does anyone really think that the worst serial killer in a state's history would be able to escape from prison? Does anyone really think that a guard would help her escape the day after another guard that was helping her was killed by her?
==end spoilers===
Please, if you want to write a fantasy then add dragons and magic spells. The story started off fairly promising with the death of a senator and a link to a possible serial killer. But then the author just couldn't give up Gretchen, a character who is so powerful in this novel that she practically does cast magic spells and ride dragons. I found myself rolling my eyes and predicting what would happen next by simply thinking of the stupidest possible plot twist. So I recommend that you don't waste your time on this book.
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The Good Thief
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by Hannah Tinti
Edition: Hardcover |
| Price: £12.99 |
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| Availability: Not in stock; order now and we'll deliver when available |
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1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Ill-defined characters and a boring plot, 16 Feb 2009
It only takes a few points to make a novel worth reading... characters you care about, a well-described setting, and some kind of interesting conflict. Unfortunately, "The Good Thief" has none of these. The characters are poorly developed and I assume we are supposed to develop sympathy for them because of their missing hand or their "harelip" (an offensive term the author continually uses to describe one character). The setting is confused as it isn't clear when the story takes place. We are told that shotguns are common which would place it in the period after the Civil War but one character is described as being a member of the American Society of Dental Surgeons, an organization the ceased to exist in 1856. But another character is described as wearing a powdered wig which would place it even earlier. The idea that orphans who are not adopted are drafted into an army where they have little future seems even more absurd for anytime in 19th century New England outside of the Civil War. But the greatest defect is that nothing really happens. The characters wander around a poorly described New England and occasionally steal something.
There is a basis for a good story somewhere in the book. The idea of an orphan being adopted by a con-man, thief in order to help him steal is not a bad idea for a story. But this book simply fails to make anything out of the story. The writing simply lacks the excitement or even the descriptive language that could take this story somewhere. Perhaps I am not the target audience for this book but I found it a difficult struggle to get through and can not recommend it.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Falls Short, 15 Feb 2009
Islam is one of the world's most important religions. With more than a billion adherents in 56 sovereign nations and growing minorities in many other countries, it is important that those of us who are not followers of Islam at least understand it. This books offers a basic look at Islam and the Muslim people throughout the world. Unfortunately, it leaves many unanswered questions and answers many questions that seem trivial at best.
A simple example should explain my point. The authors remind us that only Muslims are permitted to enter the sacred city of Mecca but they fail to answer the most basic question... how does once become a Muslim? Does Islam have a form of baptism? Does one get a certificate when one joins? Is there a quiz? How are non-Muslims prevented from entering Mecca? These most basic questions apparently never occurred to the authors. But they do devote a chapter to the clothes Muslims wear. In fact, this is a basic problem with the book. The choice of topics seems to be almost random rather than selected for importance and their lack of order makes the book feel more like a series of articles than a book.
There also seems to be an attempt to be an apologist for Islam as well. The violent overthrow of a government in the Arab world is claimed to be the moral equivalent of using money to buy influence in the West. The authors try to claim that polygamy is justified because it prevents adultery and prostitution. They make the claim that women were historically better treated in the Muslim world than the Christian world without offering any evidence to justify the claim. They make the absurd claim that a 10th century passage about the evolution of language prefigures the Darwinian theory of evolution which shows a complete lack of understanding of Darwin's theory. They try to make the claim that suicide bombings are not acceptable in Islam by claiming historical backing but since Islam does not condemn them today, the claim has no basis other than wishful thinking.
I had hoped the book would be like an "Islam for Dummies" but it falls far short. The history is fragmented and there is more information in the definitions list at the back of the book than in the text. Overall, the book is a fair introduction to this most important topic but it falls far short of being a complete introduction.
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Sarah's Key
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by Tatiana de Rosnay
Edition: Paperback |
| Price: £4.98 |
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| Availability: In stock |
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Strongly Recommended, 15 Feb 2009
It isn't often that I find a book that I can recommend without reservation. This is one of those books. The story is fascinating, emotional, and pulls you in. You won't want to put it down but you will so you can think about what you have just read. You will have to remind yourself to take a breath. It will make you cry and cheer.
On July 16, 1942, the French police rounded up Jewish families in order to send them to Auschwitz for extermination. The Nazis wanted only the adults but the French took whole families and then tore them apart. The children were ultimately sent later and all (more than 4,000) were immediately killed as soon as they arrived at the death camp. Sarah is 10 years old when the Paris police knock on her door. Her 4 year old brother Michel is too terrified to go so Sarah locks him in a secret cabinet promising to come back to free him and then she is taken away.
Sixty years later, Julia, an American living in Paris, is given the assignment of writing an article for the sixtieth anniversary of what has become known as Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv, the roundup and murder of Parisian Jews in 1942. As she investigates the story she finds that few French know or care about those events. It is the past and most Parisians wish to leave it that way. During her research, Julia discovers the story of Sarah and finds that Sarah's story intermingles with her family's story as the apartment that her husband's family moved into in 1942 is the same apartment Sarah was torn from in 1942.
The first half of the book mixes these two stories in short chapters of only a couple of pages that keep the story moving quickly. The story of Sarah is what we wish to follow so the interludes with Julia as we learn about her family, her job, and the beginnings of her investigation of Sarah are kept short. The result is that the first half of the book is among some of the best writing I have encountered recently. We learn the story of Sarah, a character we wish we could wrap our arms around and protect, while being introduced to Julia, a character that we learn to like.
At the end of the first half of the book, Sarah's voice is gone and we count on Julia, who we have learned to like, to tell us the rest of the story. de Rosnay wraps Julia and Sarah's story together in the second half of the book so that we learn what happened to Sarah through Julia's investigation as we see how Sarah's story changes Julia. The second half of the story is not as strong as the first half but I still could not put the book down and had to race through the last chapters to find how it ends. This is an amazing story that reminds us that the Holocaust was about the murder of innocent people including little children whose only crime was being born Jewish. Strongly recommended.
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Our Lady of Pain
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by Elena Forbes
Edition: Hardcover |
| Price: £12.99 |
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| Availability: In stock |
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Dark and Fast Moving, 15 Feb 2009
There are several things that I look for in a mystery. The story should make me care about the characters. There should be plenty of clues. The solution should be an "of course" moment. It should be well-paced. "Our Lady of Pain" has all of these. The author does a great job of avoiding the "sophomore jinx" by writing a good follow-up to the first book in her series.
Rachel Tenison, a beautiful art dealer, is found dead in a park one snowy winter morning. Her body is found in a way that suggests a sadistic killer. Who wanted her dead? Was it her business partner, Richard Greville? Her half-brother, MP Patrick Tenison? Her occasional lover, Jason Bourne? Her friend, Liz Volpe? And is this murder related to the murder of Catherine Watson? Detectives Mark Tartaglia and Sam Donovan have to sift through the clues and find the killer. There are enough suspects and clues as well as red-herrings to keep the story moving.
London is a used well as a backdrop in this "noir" mystery where it is always either snowing, raining, or night time. The author creates a dark atmosphere which permeates the story and helps creates a sense of impending evil. It's not the greatest mystery ever written but as an entertaining read it fills the requirements. If you are looking for something fast and cleverly written, then you can do a lot worse than "Our Lady of Pain".
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Not a history - More of a bore, 15 Feb 2009
If a book claims to be a history of a place, then it should at least give the reader decent coverage of the history of that place. But this book fails in that most basic requirement. The author is much more interested in discussing Alfons Mucha and how the Munich Agreement affected this relatively unknown artist than he is in discussing how Czechoslovakia ended up the victim of Hitler. But that fairly well reflects the book as it is more a history of various Czech authors and artists than it is of the Czech people.
The back of the book makes the claim that the book is a "comprehensive history of the Czech people." Unfortunately this is not true. Turn to any page and instead of reading about an event in Czech history, you will read about a sculptor or magazine editor and how they felt about some event that is never actually explained. The book is a struggle to get through if you are not already familiar with the history of Bohemia. If you don't know much about the Slansky trials of the early 1950's, don't expect to know more after reading this book other than what books were banned. And for some unexplained reason, the author decided to end his book in 1960, just before the the reforms that led to the Velvet Revolution. I learned much more about Czech history reading "Under the Cruel Star" than I did reading this book.
Perhaps the book would have been better off described as a review of art and literature in Bohemia up until 1960. At least the book would have been more accurate in its description. After reading this book, I do not feel that I understand the people of the Czech Republic any better than when I started. I can truly say that this is a book that I did not enjoy reading in the least. If ever there was a book that made me feel I wasted my money, this is that book.
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Fault Lines
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by Nancy Huston
Edition: Paperback |
| Price: £5.95 |
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| Availability: In stock |
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Interesting but flawed, 15 Feb 2009
"Fault Lines" is an interesting book. Presented in four sections going back in time, each section is twenty years after the next section, the book creates puzzles about the characters and then slowly reveals the answers as their past is revealed. Each section is presented as written by the parent of the child who wrote the previous section until the final section is written in 1944-45 by the great grandmother of the writer of the first section.
The story presented involves an aspect of Nazi history rarely written about and the author does a nice job of linking the sections together. But each section of the book is supposed to have been written by a six year old and the writing makes this unbelievable. Right from the start, we are presented with a character, Sol, who at six years old likes to look at videos of beheadings and rapes. He doesn't chew his food but lets it soak in his mouth and is overly concerned with his bowel movements. His oddities make him unbelievable and completely unlikeable but worse his behaviors are unexplained. Each of the other voices are from children who have been damaged but the reasons for their damage is part of the puzzle that is revealed as the story unfolds. The other three children, although not sounding like any six year old, are at least sympathetic. And each section also discusses a piece of history: the war in Iraq, the massacres in Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon, the Bay of Pigs (why is the US sending pigs to Cuba?), and finally the bombing of Dresden.
If you can get past the narration by these adult six year olds, there is an interesting story here. There is a unique humanity to the characters (other than Sol) that makes the book hard to put down. It is worth giving a try. I will add that the final section of the book was by far the best. It made me interested in finding a novel about life in Nazi Germany from the viewpoint of a child.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Dumbing Down Dexter, 15 Feb 2009
It's sad to see such a good series descend to this level. This book was a real disappointment. It's hard to know where to start but the overall premise of the book, that Dexter's "Dark Passenger" is actually a supernatural possession by some kind of child of Moloch an eternal something-or-other, lacks so much believability that it ruins the entire series. What made the first two books so good was that Dexter was the sociopath trying to live in the real world. His "Dark Passenger" was simply a different part of Dexter's personality. The success of the books was that we rooted for Dexter and his "Dark Passenger" in spite of him being a sociopath. But how can we root for some horrible monster that possesses Dexter and forces him to kill?
But Lindsay goes too far even with his idea of how someone becomes a sociopath. Every child, at least according to Lindsay, who is abused as a child, grows up to be a serial killer. Rita's two kids both become sociopaths because they were abused by their father. But that isn't how it happens in the real world. Not all serial killers were abused and not everyone who is abused becomes a serial killer. We can root for Dexter when he is unique and only killing other serial killers, but how can we root for him to create more serial killers? Dexter should be sending the children for intense psychotherapy, not lessons in how to kill.
And worst of all, the book is simply boring. Nothing much happens. There are murders but it is impossible to keep straight who is killing who and the murders (and murderers) are almost irrelevant. We hear more about donuts and wedding caterers than we do about anything else. And there really is no mystery in the story. We find out in the first pages of the book who did it although I kept hoping that the book wasn't really going to be this stupid and that Lindsay would give us some other surprise solution. I am fairly confident that this is the last Dexter book I will be reading.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Well written look at Edwardian England, 9 April 2008
It's 1999 and Grace Bradley receives a note from a movie producer. A film is being made about a suicide that occurred in 1924 at an estate in England called Riverton where Grace worked as a servant. Grace is suddenly confronted with the memories of what happened that night and the secret that she has been holding for 75 years. Grace was only 14 years old when she started working at Riverton just before the First World War started. Over the course of the book, we learn about her life and the lives of the Hartford family, especially the two young girls Hannah and Emmeline, over the next 10 years culminating in that night in 1924.
Kate Morton has written a very entertaining novel. She cleverly intertwines the story of 98 year old Grace Bradley remembering the past and 14 year old Grace Bradley experiencing it. Morton creates characters that are interesting but at the same time their mistakes are frustrating but make them seem more human. Morton's characters live life as a series of mistakes connected by failures to learn from them. Morton creates wonderful imagery with her writing and it is easy to see that her degree in English Literature was not wasted.
The story is enjoyable but not perfect. Many questions are raised and ignored. Why did Robbie wait so long to contact Hannah? What happened at Riverton while Hannah and Grace were away that led to Mr. Hartford's death? Why did Grace keep her secrets from Hannah? At the same time, Morton does a wonderful job with foreshadowing to pull the reader further into the story to find out why this happened or what did this clue mean? Overall, this is a wonderful book that I am glad to recommend.
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