Book Reviews
Showing reviews for November 2009.
by John Sutherland on 12 November 2009
In which John Sutherland –academic, critic and expert on all things bookish tours some of the less familiar byways of literature.
One of our best-known and best-loved literary critics turns his attention to the more bizarre areas of literature in this miscellany of fact and trivia. Which...
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by Martha Sherrill on 12 November 2009
A stunning portrait of the Japanese rebel who single-handedly rescued the 4,000-year-old Akita dog breed. .At the end of World War II, there were only 16 Akita dogs left in Japan. Morie Sawataishi became obsessed with preventing the extinction of the 4,000-year-old breed. He defied convention, broke...
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by William L. Iggiagruk on 12 November 2009
For William L. Iggiagruk Hensley, Alaska has been his home, his identity, and his cause. Born on the shores of Kotzebue Sound, twenty-nine miles north of the Arctic Circle, he was raised to live the traditional, seminomadic life that his Inupiaq ancestors had lived for thousands of years. It...
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by Janelle McCulloch on 12 November 2009
In need of inspiration - for work, life and love - two friends, an architect and a writer, set off in nervous search of America and all its cheesy, breezy, glossily glamorous, red-blue-and-white-striped charm. Armed with iPods full of classic seventies songs, the two embark on an Autumn odyssey in a...
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by Margaret Drabble on 12 November 2009
This is a beautifully written and deeply personal book on the jigsaw puzzle and the part it plays in the puzzle of its distinguished author's life. It is a mix of memoir, jigsaw history and the strange delights of puzzling. Drabble - among countless others - has found solace from assembling...
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by Ray Mears on 12 November 2009
Ray Mears has travelled the world for much of his life learning and teaching wilderness skills. Now he reflects on his experiences in some of the most remote and beautiful places on Earth along with his own stunning photographs of the landscapes and peoples he's encountered. Fascinated by...
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by Leilah Nadir on 12 November 2009
Born to an Iraqi Christian father and a British mother, and raised in Britain and Canada, Leilah Nadir has never set foot on Iraqi soil - the closest link she has to the nation is through her father, who left Baghdad in the 1960s to pursue his studies in England. His Iraq is a place of...
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by Celia Robertson on 12 November 2009
By the end of her life, Sophie Curly was essentially a bag lady you might have walked past on a park bench, or ignored, as she looked for something over and over again in her handbag.: She hadn't always been Sophie Curly. Back in the 1930s she was Joan Adeney Easdale, a teenage girl with two volumes...
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by Sue Williams on 12 November 2009
Drought, flood, harrowing isolation and horrific accidents...the Australian outback is no place for a lady. But the women of the Outback are a different breed: tough, resilient and endlessly resourceful. They're both the backbone and the heart of Australia, keeping their farms going, their families...
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by Mark Price on 12 November 2009
What can a man of adventure do when every mountain has been climbed, every river navigated to its source, and every Guinness record stretched to impossibility? He can spin a globe of the world and discover that his small country has its own antipodes - yet unknown and unexplored! He can set off to...
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