Tarusina Darya Darya itibaren Jawai Parari, Uttar Pradesh, Hindistan
After a fantastic start this was strangely anticlimactic, verging on quite boring by the end. I couldn't understand it. I think the fact that there was a total of 2 female characters in the entire book might've had something to do with it - so boring. I was a bit confused that Beric didn't seem to care much when he found out he was Titus's son, even though he spent most of the book obsessing about feeling like an 'outcast' in every society because he knew nothing about his real parents. And why didn't he go back to Rome after finding out he was in fact Roman, to find Glaccus and Lucilla's husband conveniently dead so that he could marry her? Would've made a FAR better story. I did like the fact that it was so well-researched, especially the way most Romans were portrayed as viewing slaves as animals - they referred to things like "meat-fed galley slaves" and "a well-matched team" of blonde-haired litter-bearers. In a lot of historical fiction I think this idea is seen as too repugnant for the modern audience or something because whilst Romans are often shown being cruel to their slaves, they usually understand that they're human and treat them accordingly. Or maybe the current social distate for slavery is so strong that modern authors find it hard to get into the ancient Roman mindset? Who knows. Anyway in conclusion I would definitely still like to read more by this author.
It was cute, but I definitely can't say that it qualifies as great literature.
This is perhaps the best book I have read on urban minitry and theology in along time. Gornik and others are founding pastors of New Song Church in Sandtown, a neighborhood in Baltimore. Gornik provides a thorough analysis of the community and the work he and others did blending solciolgy, economics, theology, and political analysis in a seamless way. Gornik footnotes and references are almost as rich as the text itself, so I will find myself going back to it again I am sure
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1194445.html[return][return]I had forgotten just how good this is. Its 200 pages far outshine all later (and mostly longer) invasion-of-Earth stories (or even just disaster stories like The Stand). It feels so very fresh, one of the basic plots of science fiction being written for the first time. Yes, of course it's strongly reliant on tales of human wars, both those set in the contemporary late nineteenth century and those set in the (then) near future; but this chilling sentence - of mildly dodgy grammar but impeccable pace - in the first paragraph makes it clear that this is not about the Germans:[return][return]Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.[return][return]In the earlier chapters, there's a fixation with circumstantial detail - especially of the geography of Surrey - which gives the whole narrative an immediacy which is curiously intensified as the conflict goes on and fewer and fewer characters get names - 'the artilleryman', 'the curate', and rather oddly to today's reader, 'my wife'. (And 'my brother', though his lady friends, the Elphinstones, do get names.)[return][return]So much here is reminiscent of later stories and indeed of history - the rescue of the English refugees by small boats from the rest of Europe is an odd inversion of Dunkirk; the tripods pop up in John Christopher; the gas warfare waged by the aliens against London was soon to happen in real life.[return]Anyway, a really excellent, short read.