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Class of 1957 Book Review Site. ©2007. To add a Book Review, or to comment on a book already in this listing, send your material or review to Sam Coulbourn at Persnav@shore.net. Photo at top of each page shows ENS Arleigh Burke beneath 14-inch gun aboard Battleship USS Arizona, 1923. Revised 27 March 2008. |
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BIOGRAPHY Secret Life, A
By Benjamin Weiser, 2004.
A true story about a Polish Officer who decided on his own accord to give military secrets to the US during the Cold War in order to save Poland from catastrophe. He was considered our top source of intelligence about the USSR War plans during the 70's and early 80's. Reads like a spy novel.
BIOGRAPHY Subway Music By Joe Junker (Class of ‘57), 2005. Joe Junker takes us on a journey into his past, which is the sentimental if not actual past of so many of us. The title says it all: Subway calls to mind movement, interaction, “underground” motivations, displacement—from Manhattan where this autobiography begins, to Brooklyn, a haven of family and friends, to Annapolis, to California, and to the world beyond. The Music of New York, its many accents, its hilarious tales, its pulsating rhythms play against the backdrop of the diversity of the City as young men of modest origins seek to leave the cultural confines of families and neighborhoods to become actors on a larger stage. But it is New York of the 1950s that gives Junker’s work its flavor. Junker revels in recollections of friends and companions, sights, scents, smells, songs that were his and ours. While the novel is very personally inspired, it should resonate for anyone who wants to recapture a past worth recapturing. Thomas Wolfe’s famous posthumous novel proposes that You Can’t Go Home Again. Joe Junker would add: except in your dreams.
ART
The Steinway Collection- Paintings of Great Composers with essays by James Huneker
Published 2005
Beautiful color paintings by prominent American artists and eloquent prose portraits by renowned music critic James Huneker celebrate lives of Chopin, Wagner, Liszt, Beethoven, Mozart, Verdi, Mendelssohn, Schubert and Handel. The Steinway Collection was originally published in 1919 as an in-house publication and until recently had never been released to the public.
FICTION FICTION Balzac and the little Chinese Seamstress
By Dai Sijie, 2002.
This book provides significant insights into the Cultural Revolution in China. Here’s how Publisher’s Weekly describes it. “The Cultural Revolution of Chairman Mao Zedong altered Chinese history in the 1960s and '70s, forcibly sending hundreds of thousands of Chinese intellectuals to peasant villages for "re-education." This moving, often wrenching short novel by a writer who was himself re-educated in the '70s tells how two young men weather years of banishment, emphasizing the power of literature to free the mind. Sijie's unnamed 17-year-old protagonist and his best friend, Luo, are bourgeois doctors' sons, and so condemned to serve four years in a remote mountain village, carrying pails of excrement daily up a hill. Only their ingenuity helps them to survive. The two friends are good at storytelling, and the village headman commands them to put on "oral cinema shows" for the villagers, reciting the plots and dialogue of movies. When another city boy leaves the mountains, the friends steal a suitcase full of forbidden books he has been hiding, knowing he will be afraid to call the authorities. Enchanted by the prose of a host of European writers, they dare to tell the story of The Count of Monte Cristo to the village tailor and to read Balzac to his shy and beautiful young daughter. Luo, who adores the Little Seamstress, dreams of transforming her from a simple country girl into a sophisticated lover with his foreign tales. He succeeds beyond his expectations, but the result is not what he might have hoped for, and leads to an unexpected, droll and poignant conclusion. . . . Sijie's debut was a best-seller and prize winner in France in 2000, and rights have been sold in 19 countries; it is also scheduled to be made into a film.”
FICTION I Am Charlotte Simmons
By Tom Wolfe, 2004.
This is a book about the role of status in today’s modern university. The heroine is a brilliant student from a very poor family in North Carolina, whose academic prowess lands her in an elite university. Unfortunately, prepared as she is academically, she is from a different world than her affluent peers when it comes to the current social mores of the university. Wolfe spends considerable portion of the book exposing the hypocrisy of big-time collegiate athletics, basketball in this case. He lays bare the realities of life in co-ed dorms and the excesses of the fraternities/sororities. A splendidly written book, based on extensive research at numerous universities across the nation.
Reviewed by Paul Roush.
FICTION Exile
By Richard North Patterson, 2007. (Henry Holt, , 562 pp.)
I would give five stars to any of the author's thirteen prior novels. He is absolutely the best in bringing readers into the multi-dimensional world of law and its negotiations among lawyers about evidence, with judges about politics and with clients about the elusive concept called the "truth." (Yes, clients do ration the "truth.") This book opens with three questions: First, will a successful attorney throw aside his career and his rich fiancée to take the case of a Palestinian woman who is accused of assassinating the Israeli Prime Minister and with whom he had an intense affair while both were at Harvard Law? Second, will he be able to get her off? Third, who killed the Prime Minister and how will he prove it? The answer to the first is "Yes" as the book would otherwise be over at page 20. The next is also a "Yes" as, in view of his preceding novel on the death penalty, this book would be over a thousand pages if she were found guilty. As to the third, I have no idea as I gave up around page 300. I recommend the earlier books.
Review by Tony Crowell, February, 2007.
FICTION Final Bearing (Tom Doherty Associates Book)
By CDR George Wallace, USN (Ret.) and Don Keith, 2003, Forge Books, 510 pp., hardcover (also in Mass Market Paperback)
This book, by George Wallace with acclaimed novelist, Don Keith, starts off gangbusters and never lets up. Anti-drug campaign, submarines, SEAL Teams, Colombia, DEA, covert operations, jungles, police, politics, and what else can I say? When finished with the 510 pages, the feeling is, "why does it have to end?" Some of you may have served with George. He retired after 22 years as a nuclear submariner and commanded the USS Houston SSN 713 from 2/90-8/92. He had a distinguished career, and I sure enjoyed his book. Subsequently, I loaned it to a friend who read it cover to cover without stopping. It is pure fiction, but believable, unlike many futuristic sub books that I've read which are not. The last email address that I have for George is georgew@rmi.net for anyone who might want to contact him, though it might have changed.
Review by Jim Paulk, April, 2007. FICTION Innocent Man, The
By John Grisham, 2006.
FICTION Kite Runner, The
By Khaled Hosseini, 2003.
Hosseini traces several recent turbulent decades in Afghanistan’s long history by following the interaction between Amir, the son of a wealthy businessman, a Sunni Muslim, and Hassan, the son of the businessman’s servant a Sh’ia Muslim. The story begins under the relatively peaceful days of the monarchy, moves into the civil war, the Russian occupation of about a decade, and the rise of the rule of the Taliban after the Russians leave. Amir’s family leaves for America during the time of the Russian occupation, but Amir comes back in an unsuccessful attempt to bring Hassan out during the Taliban regime. The book provides an account of family and friendship, and of betrayal and salvation. It is a portrait of decades of violence and struggle at the national and personal level.
Reviewed by Paul Roush.
FICTION Life and Fate
By Vasily Grossman, 1986.
This work has been hailed both as “the great Russian novel of the 20th century” and as “the greatest book never known.” Publishers Weekly described it thusly.
FICTION Ordinary Heroes
By Scott Turow, 2005.
This somewhat irregular World War II novel touches a lot of familiar places like OSS activities and the Battle of the Bulge but does so in an offbeat manner that has put off some reviewers. Told as flashbacks by Stewart Dubinsky attempting to find what his father, Stephen Dubin, had actually done in the War, the book gets into the position of military lawyers and of Jews in the American Army as well as some other minorities. Some of the incidents may seem a bit far-fetched but the book pounds home a theme of the excessively realistic smells, sounds and suffering of war. As such, it is something of an antidote to some of the prettified Stephen Ambrose stuff and should be required reading for every Defense Department official who has never seen combat. It is an interesting departure from the usual courtroom stuff of this author and an engrossingly good read.
FICTION Restless
By William Boyd, 2006, (324 pp. —Due in paperback March, 2007)
This veteran English novelist has spun a subtle spy thriller told in part by a young Oxford graduate teaching English to foreigners in a warm English summer of 1976 who finds that her quiet widowed mother may have been someone else. In fact, she may have been Russian, and also a spy. The story cycles between the daughter exploring what her mother may have been and the mother’s flashbacks to 1939. After her brother is killed under mysterious circumstances, she is recruited by British intelligence. Sent to an interesting training course at a great house somewhere in the English countryside, she is then posted, first to Belgium and then to New York. There, she is involved in an almost forgotten effort by British intelligence to encourage the U.S. to enter the war. This effort comes to an end with Pearl Harbor but not until after she is forced to go into the cold. Her struggles to adapt and survive in a series of demanding situations make for fascinating drama. The daughter, a single mother of a young boy, contends with raising him in a student environment while helping her mother deal with imagined threats to her life. Or are they imaginary? Coming out soon in paperback, this is a sophisticated tale well above the average spy story. Makes a good weekend read and would make a wonderful movie with either Kate Winslet or Cate Blanchett
Review by Tony Crowell, February, 2007
FICTION Shantaram
By Gregory D. Roberts, 2003.
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