Helpful votes received on reviews:
93% (330 of 354)
Location: Brisbane, Australia
In My Own Words:
Hello,
I like to review literature. Think Penguin Classics and so forth.
I greatly admire Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, with my admiration tending towards Mr Roth. Other favoured authors include Mann, Camus, Updike, Montaigne, Tolstoy.
I am happy to review books submitted to me by publishers or authors. If you are interested, email me and we'll sort something out.
Damian
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Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
History has a way of sweeping people up as it relentlessly marches along its way. Tolstoy, in a long essay found as the epilogue to War and Peace, goes to great lengths to explain that the force of history is the accumulation of a million different happenstances, and not the directed will of a single person or group of people. Napoleon, he argues, was as swept along as the rest, with the primary difference being that we remember his name because he led the French, as opposed to the tens of thousands of faceless (though not, of course, to their families!) men and women who died. Maria Barbal's Stone in a Landslide captures the essence of this argument well, showing us a single, very… Read more
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In the hurry to become independent adults, children often forget that while their actions are, for them, additive, they often strike their parents as a loss. A baby soon becomes a toddler, and then a child, and then a teenager, and then an adult, and then they experience the cycle for themselves. But a parent doesn't stop being a parent, and each phase, as it slips away, is forever lost and always remembered. Véronique Olmi's Beside the Sea is a novel of motherhood, though not as it is described in the ordinary sense. Olmi takes, as her subject, the possessive and suffocating aspects of a mother's love, and examines the consequence of the terrifying logic that can afflict a sickened… Read more
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
The aim of the Cambridge University Press to provide a coherent scholarly work on the early modern English period from manuscript to Milton that is both accessible to the interested public and appropriate for the research student and academic is a lofty one, and fortunately it is a goal they generally succeed in achieving. The scope of the work is vast, from the expected examination of the literary impact of such giants as Milton, Pepys, Shakespeare, Sidney and Donne, to the more specific and thematic discussion on literature and the church, the court, the household, the sense of national identity, and London's influence on authors and the book selling business. The Cambridge History of… Read more
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