Read the INK Q&A with Howard Blum and save 30% on American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century.
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Read the INK Q&A with Howard Blum and save 30% on American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century.
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g.donahue has commented on (8) products.
Siam: Or the Woman Who Shot a Man (Sewanee Writers') by Lily Tuck
g.donahue, March 16, 2008
With true Lily Tuck style, the author chooses a poignant period of history and wraps a good story through it. Limited to under 200 pages, this author writes a laconic, yet powerful and suspenseful story coupled with a surprising twist of events. The setting is 1967 in Bangkok on the verge of the Vietnamese War with youthful Claire and her young husband moving to Bangkok for his governmental contract work. Claire, a young bride is thrust into a foreign culture on the verge of war with an absentee husband. The title suggests it could be about a place or a person. Both topics deserve our attention. Highly recommended.(2 of 4 readers found this comment helpful)
The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck
g.donahue, March 16, 2008
One of the ways in which I judge a book is whether I want to read more by this author. Or, even better, did you ever finish a book and want to reread it? Then you have a winner. I wanted to do both. The writing style hits me first. It draws me in with an almost journalistic style of a story set in the 1850’s in the French-settled Paraguay. Her fiction transports the reader to places and times rich in stories and characters, yet her style is one of succinctness and focus. She never lost me amid the stories. The author chooses a female protagonist, Ella Lynch, Irish born and beautiful, to tell the story of 19th century Paraguay. The story unfolds in her youth in Paris. A grand history of the little-known country of Paraguay and its violent war with its neighbors.(3 of 6 readers found this comment helpful)
James McNeill Whistler :beyond the myth by Ronald Anderson
g.donahue, January 27, 2008
If you like art, but think you don’t know enough about it, a great artist’s biography can give one an education and insight along with a good read. This volume of over 400 pages, chronologically covers the life of this important and versatile American artist. His childhood spent in America and Russia, his fights with the art world establishments in London and Paris at a crucial period in the history of art, his many women, his irascible nature, and the controversial nocturnes and their effect on the art world. A fascinating read of an expatriate at the end of the 19th century as well as a great read of the Parisian art world and the struggles artists endured to forge in new directions. The real power of the biographical genre is, I feel, the anecdotal information one gleans of the coterie of artists surrounding the central figure; and this biography relishes us with compassionate anecdotes about Whistler’s friend Monet, visits with the French Realists, Manet and Courbet, difficulties with literary great Oscar Wilde, and many more. “Whistler’s life provides a window through which we catch a glimpse of one of the most exciting periods of art and social history.”(2 of 5 readers found this comment helpful)
Portrait: The Life of Thomas Eakins by William S Mcfeely
g.donahue, January 27, 2008
A charming, short (200 pp) biography of this all-American artist. His close ties with his family, friends, his heartaches, and his successes in his lifetime are treated with clarity, compassion, and succinctness, along with nodding references to his homosexuality and the Victorian repressions that thwarted it. I loved the author’s chapter on the relationship with Walt Whitman. Both artists, Whitman 20 years Eakins’ senior, sought for the freedom of the soul of the artist, and both are revered to this day for that work. “Whitman said of Eakins that he was more than “a painter—a force.” Thomas Eakins lived during a burgeoning and newly-defining period of American Art History. Art schools and art museums in all the big cities were just getting started in the latter half of the 19th century and Eakins was instrumental in challenging traditional mores in these academies. Classical European artwork filled the homes of the wealthy with an American style still finding its direction. Thomas Eakins’ life and work existed at a very important time in the country. His verisimilitude of the American soul in art pointed to the future, indeed, to the New York Ash Can School of the early 20th century and beyond. Biographies don’t have to read like novels, but a good biography should inspire and educate and McFeely does just that in a much-appreciated 200 pages.(2 of 4 readers found this comment helpful)
A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell
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1-5 of 8 nextg.donahue, January 27, 2008
A carefully researched historical work of fiction and well worth the read. I love reading historical fiction that informs us of little-known points of history that would otherwise be forgotten, and the story of the resistance in Northern Italy at the end of World War II is one of these notable stories. Thus, the research and resulting story itself wins me over. The rabbis, the priests, the housewives, even the children–all worked together in the mountains and towns of Northern Italy to fight the German Nazi machine---good certainly triumphing over evil in this case. The unexpected heroism of the Italians overcomes the darkness and evil that so clearly took place during this time. But don’t expect a clean, crisp, melodious telling of the story. The tentacles of death found their way to far too many characters to leave one settled. And the tentacles wind their way through far too macabre scenes of grisly murder and wrenching sadness. Technically, I would have been just as intrigued had the author focused more on fewer characters and developed them better. The characters, the setting, and the themes get lost---almost like a Hieronymous Bosch painting with chaos dashing in and out of the scene and every character just a prop. Characters who change names or use other names drop in and out of the picture making it hard for the reader to identify. In reading other reviews of this book, I don’t seem to be alone in this complaint. However, the author does provide a cheat sheet of characters and a map in the beginning to refer to which helps somewhat. Despite this one fault, the story held up as an important and worthy read of a period in history which displayed the extremes of human behavior.(2 of 4 readers found this comment helpful)