Tag: reviewed

Book Review – World’s End (Lanny Budd #1) by Upton Sinclair

whatcathyreadnext

About the Book

worlds-end

Lanning “Lanny” Budd spends his first thirteen years in Europe, living at the center of his mother’s glamourous circle of friends on the French Riviera. In 1913, he enters a prestigious Swiss boarding school and befriends Rick, an English boy, and Kurt, a German. The three schoolmates are privileged, happy, and precocious—but their world is about to come to an abrupt and violent end.
 
When the gathering storm clouds of war finally burst, raining chaos and death over the continent, Lanny must put the innocence of youth behind him; his language skills and talent for decoding messages are in high demand. At his father’s side, he meets many important political and military figures, learns about the myriad causes of the conflict, and closely follows the First World War’s progress. When the bloody hostilities eventually conclude, Lanny joins the Paris Peace Conference as the assistant to a geographer asked by President Woodrow Wilson to redraw the map of Europe.

Format: ebook (922 pages) Publisher: Open Road Media
Publication date: 19th January 2016 [1940] Genre: Historical Fiction

Find World’s End on Goodreads

Purchase World’s End from Amazon UK

My Review

World’s End is the first novel in Upton Sinclair’s ‘Lanny Budd’ series. First published in 1940, the book covers the period from 1913 to 1919 and is the beginning of a monumental 7,340 page novel, the story of a young American, Lanny Budd.

Lanny is drawn to art, poetry and music but, as the son of an American munitions manufacturer, is exposed to arguments of commercial reality,  power-broking and realpolitik.  The conflict Lanny experiences as he struggles to make sense of these opposing forces is at the heart of the novel.   This is a long novel and at times, particularly in Part 5 covering the attempts to arrive at a peace settlement, it seems more straight history than historical fiction but Lanny’s Forrest Gump-like ability to be at the centre of important events and several underlying stories stop it from feeling completely like a college course. 

Upton Sinclair depicts the motives of the countries involved, particularly Great Britain, France and America, with brutal clarity. ‘Now they were here, not to form a League of Nations, not to save mankind from future bloodshed, but to divvy the swag.’  That the war was fought for control of  natural resources (coal, oil, steel) and territory is made very clear and in this sense, the lesson of history is that nothing much has changed.

In three words: Epic, detailed, factual
Try something similar: Any Human Heart by William Boyd

About the Author

Upton Sinclair wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

 

Book Review – Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfař

whatcathyreadnext

About the Book

spaceman-of-behemia

An intergalactic odyssey of love, ambition, and self-discovery

Orphaned as a boy, raised in the Czech countryside by his doting grandparents, Jakub Procházka has risen from small-time scientist to become the country’s first astronaut. When a dangerous solo mission to Venus offers him both the chance at heroism he’s dreamt of, and a way to atone for his father’s sins as a Communist informer, he ventures boldly into the vast unknown. But in so doing, he leaves behind his devoted wife, Lenka, whose love, he realizes too late, he has sacrificed on the altar of his ambitions.

Alone in Deep Space, Jakub discovers a possibly imaginary giant alien spider, who becomes his unlikely companion. Over philosophical conversations about the nature of love, life and death, and the deliciousness of bacon, the pair form an intense and emotional bond. Will it be enough to see Jakub through a clash with secret Russian rivals and return him safely to Earth for a second chance with Lenka?

Format: ebook (288 pages) Publisher: Little, Brown
Publication date: 9th March 2017 Genre: Science Fiction

Find Spaceman of Bohemia on Goodreads

Purchase Spaceman of Bohemia from Amazon UK

My Review

Spaceman of Bohemia is a space adventure, chronicle of recent Czech history and love story all rolled into one.

Blasted into space to investigate a purple dust cloud christened Chopra, like Robinson Crusoe, Jakub detects signs of his strange companion before his actual encounter.  But is this entity a product of space madness, Jakub’s infected tooth or a much more significant moment for mankind?  Whichever it is, the encounter is a vehicle for Jakub to revisit the events of his youth, notably the trauma of discovering his father’s chequered history and a meeting that will reverberate in future years. ‘When my father the hero was lost, my father the nation’s villain came to light.’

Jakub’s belief that he is the biological carrier of his father’s curse – ‘It must rest within my bowels like a tapeworm’ – and must make amends for it is the catalyst for his resolution to undertake the dangerous space mission, so important for the pride of his fledgling nation. 

A review would not be complete without mentioning the brutally honest depiction of the relationship between Jakub and Lenka that is both believable and ultimately moving.  The author’s writing style grew on me and some of his metaphors are very imaginative: ‘Comets are the universe’s dumpster divers, vagrants pushing their carts of intergalactic junk tirelessly over the centuries.’ Others occasionally less so.  His descriptions of sights, sounds and particularly smells are very evocative.    A very impressive first novel.

I received a review copy courtesy of Little, Brown via NetGalley.

Post review note: A film version of the book entitled Spaceman starring Adam Sandler and Carey Mulligan was released in 2004.

In three words: Quirky, imaginative, moving
Try something similar: The Things We Learn When We’re Dead by Charlie Laidlaw

About the Author

Jaroslav Kalfař was born and raised in Prague, Czech Republic, and emigrated to the United States at the age of fifteen, speaking little to no English at that time but learning it by watching Cartoon Network. His debut novel, Spaceman of Bohemia, was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, The Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a nominee for the Dublin Literary Award, and has been published in fourteen languages.

Jaroslav lives in Brooklyn where he splits his time between writing novels and screenplays, and devouring any book he can get his hands on, especially books that play with genre expectations and reflect the strangest parts of life which can be found both in the mundane and the extraordinary. He travels back to the Czech Republic as often as possible to reconnect with his family, his language, his culture and history.