Archive for the ‘Political’ Category

WHEN SHE WOKE by Hilary Jordan

Hannah Payne is twenty-six years old and Red, with a capital R, her badge of shame. Her skin has been “melachromed” by the State for her crime of abortion, and for not naming the abortionist and not identifying the father, the celebrated pastor and TV (“vid”) evangelist, Aidan Dale, who is now the nation’s “Secretary of Faith.” Her sentence is thirty days confinement, and then sixteen years in the community as a Red, where she will be constantly ostracized and persecuted.

October 10, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Award Winning Author, Political, Speculative (Beyond Reality), Texas, Thriller/Spy/Caper

PORTRAIT OF A SPY by Daniel Silva

As Daniel Silva’s PORTRAIT OF A SPY opens, art restorer and master spy Gabriel Allon and his wife, Chiara, are living quietly in a cottage by the sea. Silva sets the stage with a series of events that are eerily familiar: Countries all over the world are “teetering on the brink of fiscal and monetary disaster;” Europe is having difficulty absorbing “an endless tide of Muslim immigrants;” and Bin Laden is dead, but others are scrambling to take his place. Government leaders in America and on the Continent are desperate to identify and thwart the new masterminds of terror.

July 25, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Denmark, France, Job, New York City, Political, Saudia Arabia, Sleuths Series, Thriller/Spy/Caper, United Kingdom, Washington, D.C.

THE TRINITY SIX by Charles Cumming

Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and John Cairncross, who studied at Cambridge in the 1930s, were recruited by Moscow Center to act as Soviet agents. They eventually rose to positions of prominence in such organizations as the British Foreign Office and the Secret Intelligence Service (M16). Over the years, they passed “vast numbers of classified documents to their handlers.” Charles Cumming, in The Trinity Six, suggests the existence of a sixth man whose identity was never made public. What if this individual survived decades after the other five passed away and decided that the time has come to reveal what he knows?

March 15, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Political, Thriller/Spy/Caper

THE MEMORY OF LOVE by Aminatta Forna

Incalculable grief cleaves to profound love in this elaborate, helical tapestry of a besieged people in postwar Freetown, Sierra Leone. Interlacing two primary periods of violent upheaval, author Aminatta Forna renders a scarred nation of people with astonishing grace and poise–an unforgettable portrait of open wounds and closed mouths, of broken hearts and fractured spirits, woven into a stunning evocation of recurrence and redemption, loss and tender reconciliation. Forna mines a filament of hope from resigned fatalism, from the devastation of a civil war that claimed 50,000 lives and displaced 2.5 million people. Those that survived felt hollowed out, living with an uneasy peace.

February 14, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Africa, Award Winning Author, Commonwealth Prize, Friendship, Identity, Losses, Political, War, World Literature

O: A PRESIDENTIAL NOVEL by Anonymous

It was during the 2008 presidential race that author Christopher Buckley’s delightful novel, Supreme Courtship, was released. Presciently, in the book, he had pitted two characters against each other: a senator who had run for president, served as chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, and who “just couldn’t shut up,” against a “glasses-wearing, gun-toting television hottie.” Months after the novel was conceived, Governor Sarah Palin turned out to be a nominee for Vice President running against then Senator Joe Biden. It truly was a case of life imitating fiction, Buckely later recalled in an interview. “I am announcing my retirement from satire,” he joked.

January 25, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Humorous, Political

GAME CHANGE by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

If Hollywood Central Casting were asked to put together a group of actors with the most monstrous egos on the face of the planet, they could not have done a better job than the two national parties did in the last election.

January 25, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Non-fiction, Political