Happy families, with bright, live-wire teenage daughters and cricket-mad sons, suffer and become obliterated in Sri Lanka’s endless civil war. The usual family aspirations of university educations and good marriages evaporate as war’s mayhem sweeps the island. Joanna Luloff’s The Beach at Galle Road is a series of linked short pieces that one can read as a unified novel. That is certainly the effect Ms. Luloff achieves as the last few stories conclude what is a harrowing...
March 15, 2013
"Hawk Quest" by Robert Lyndon
In Hawk Quest we follow the epic journey of a small and shifting group of questers literally around the ends of the earth: from England to the west coast of Greenland, over the northern cape of Norway and into Russia by way of the White Sea. The year is 1072 AD, the Conqueror’s Normans remain busy subjugating Britain (through the time-honored means of rape, murder, and arson); the Seljuks have routed the Christians at Manzikert (in present-day Turkey); and Vallon, the intrepid leader...
March 03, 2013
"Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde" by Rebecca Dana
Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE There are two people the title of Rebecca Dana’s memoir Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde, which is appropriate in this book, for it spins around an axis pulled taut between opposite poles. Rebecca Dana, a reporter for the Daily Beast and Newseek, and formerly with the Wall Street Journal, has assembled not...
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