Andrew Dunn

Is it 1875?

Revisado: 12-05-14

Reads like a Victorian-style history. The Big Man approach to history isn't especially interesting to me

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Good, but with reservations

Revisado: 12-05-14

The book was well read and mostly interesting. The character Boris was just annoying though, and Theo's motivation in not just handing over the painting wasn't clear to me.

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Excellent book, well read

Revisado: 12-05-14

Really enjoyed this one - McCann expertly weaves the historical narratives together into a seamless saga that keeps the reader interested throughout.

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Trying a bit too hard

Revisado: 12-05-14

I enjoyed Zeitoun and A staggering Work, but this less so. He's trying a bit too hard, and the characters are a little 2-dimensional, especially the boyfriend who is meant to personify our need to *not* be connected 24/7. Eggers seems to be of the opinion that social media users are unthinking sheep who will give up any and all notions of privacy to garner likes and friends. I don;t think it's as simple as that, though for the purposes of a parable, maybe that's what he needed to do.

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OCD?

Revisado: 12-05-14

A weird, quirky concept to walk down a line of longitude, and it makes for a pretty dull book. His dad sounds like the worst kind of pub bore too. I enjoyed his book about a walk across the mountains of Europe, but this was a disappointment

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Good book - moronic narrator

Revisado: 12-05-14

I'm heartened to see that pretty much every reviewer has pointed out how badly the reader mangles the least obscure of words, e.g. 'quay', which he renders as 'kway' instead of 'key'. How does somebody reach adulthood without a rudimentary understanding of how to pronounce pretty common words? And how does that person manage to carve out a career as an audiobook narrator?

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A Vanity Project?

Revisado: 07-30-13

I'm only partway through the audiobook, but so far, not-so-good...
I like Jonathan Dimbleby on Radio 4, where he does a good job as debate moderator on Any Questions, but I'm less convinced by him as an author and narrator.

Just a couple of examples of clumsy writing - he mentions 'circumnavigating' an aggressive dog to reach its owner's house. He's unable to discuss the Vikings without the obligatory references to rape and pillage. An old woman's stove is 'festooned' with pots and pans... Better editing might have helped to remove some of Dimbleby's stylistic excesses.

He's obviously been told to bring some of his own personality and humanity to the proceedings, so we get some non-sequitur references to his boarding school days, his boating experiences in Devon and some hedged references to a possible history of depression. His own moods and emotional responses are jarring, and add little to the reader's appreciation of the places he's reporting from.

Whereas WG Sebald, Jan Morris or Paul Theroux are able to evoke a place through its emotional impact on them, JD doesn't quite manage to pull this off, and ends up coming across as a bit of a whiner when he affects to tell us that he finds St Petersburg cold and somehow hollow at its core.

Some of the dialog and interchanges with characters also fails to convince - early on he admits to having little to no Russian (which begs the question, could he not have made an effort to learn before embarking on such an undertaking?). At one point he's conversing with an archaeologist who is enthusing about the thrill of finding artefacts - I don't think this took place: archaeologists aren't treasure hunters, and the thrill comes from piecing together evidence of the past, not from isolated trinkets, themselves of limited explanatory value.

All that said, I will persevere with the book, because I'm interested in life in the 'new' Russia, and Dimbleby has a journalist's eye for the underlying context, which is necessary and valuable to prevent the book from becoming a more straightforward travelogue.

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Thin material, but a well-paced 'read'

Revisado: 07-25-13

I'd heard about The Road to Valour in a few places, and was keen to find out about Gino Bartali, 1938 and 1948 Tour de France winner and Italian cycling legend.

The book really covers two themes - Gino's cycling career and his work during WWII to help rescue Italian jews. The evidence for the latter is a bit patchy, not least because Bartali (who died in 2000) wouldn't talk about his wartime efforts, so the authors are sometimes struggling. It's much stronger on the cycling, and especially on Bartali's battles with Coppi (his arch rival) and with the Italian press, who continually write him off.

All in all, an interesting book which illuminates the era and the eccentric figures who pedalled through it.

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Educational

Revisado: 01-21-13

Like most people, I didn't really have a clear idea exactly *why* Europe went to war in August of 1914, and why it took 4 long years to arrive at a peace. I left Meyer's book with a much better understanding of the factors and personalities that led the world into the meat grinder of the Great War.

The book is a bit too detailed in places, in terms of the military history and strategic wartime decision-making, and perhaps a bit light on the effects of war on the non-fighting people in the belligerent countries, but it's a minor quibble, and this is an excellent book.

The reader can be a little dry-sounding and dull, but he generally does well with the material. there's a few obvious audio-patches where the tone of voice changes mid-sentence or mid-para, but nothing too jarring.

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Disturbingly brilliant

Revisado: 09-07-12

I've read quite a lot about WWII and the Holocaust, but this book really bought home the scale of the industrial murder that took place between the Elbe and the Vistula and between 1933 and 1945. Snyder doesn't need to make trite comparisons between Stalinist and Hitlerian atrocities - he lets the crimes and the victims speak for themselves, and the result is a valuable and humane book that should be compulsory reading for our current crop of gung-ho intellectual pygmy leaders, keen to repeat the same mistakes in our supposedly more enlightened times.

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