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SERIOUS MEN by Manu Joseph

Manu Joseph’s debut book is seriously good – a wickedly funny, surprisingly warm and stunningly stylish satire that strikes its target over and over again, taking the reader along for a rollicking ride.

The book SERIOUS MEN introduces us to two equally willful men with runaway egos: Arvind Acharya, a bigger-than-life astrophysicist at the prestigious Institute of Theory and Research, a would-be Nobel candidate who is rumored to have been banned from the Vatican for whispering something untoward in the pope’s ear. The other is his personal assistant, Ayyan Mani, a Dalit (or “untouchable”) who is “smarter than the average bear” (in this case, the average Dalit) with an IQ of 148.

January 2, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: Class - Race - Gender, Debut Novel, Humorous, India-Pakistan, Satire, World Lit, y Award Winning Author

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot

Rebecca Skloot’s THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS is an enthralling look at the origin of HeLa cells that grew “with [such] mythological intensity,” that they “seemed unstoppable.” They were a “continuously dividing line of cells all descended from one original sample” acquired from Henrietta Lacks, a black woman who suffered from a particularly virulent form of cervical cancer complicated by syphilis…Neither she nor her family had any idea that the cells obtained from her cervix in 1951 would eventually number in the trillions and become a vital part of medical research all over the world.

December 21, 2010 · Judi Clark · 2 Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: 2010 Favorites, Class - Race - Gender, Non-fiction, US South, y Award Winning Author

UNDER FISHBONE CLOUDS by Sam Meekings

If UNDER FISHBONE CLOUDS doesn’t attain the high readership it deserves, there is no justice. It’s quite simply one of the most lavishly imagined, masterfully researched, exquisitely written contemporary novels I’ve read. And if that sounds as if I’m gushing…well, it’s probably because I am.

December 7, 2010 · Judi Clark · One Comment
Tags: , , , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2010 Favorites, China, Facing History, Family Matters, World Lit

A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR by Mark Helprin

Alessandro Giuliani is listening to field guns being tested in Munich in 1914, the year before Italy entered the War against Germany and Austria. Although mostly interested in the visual arts, Alessandro should know about music and beauty of all kinds; as a Professor of Aesthetics, it is his metier. But he learns about it the hard way. When the war breaks out, he is just about to take his doctorate at the University of Bologna. He volunteers for the Italian navy in the hope of avoiding conscription into the trenches, but he ends up in some of the worst fighting of the war nonetheless, facing the Austrians across the river Isonzo.

November 6, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Facing History, Literary, World Lit

THE MARRIAGE ARTIST by Andrew Winer

Andrew Winer has written a potboiler that is also literary. Writing about such a serious subject as the Holocaust sometimes constricts a novelist into a more conventional form of storytelling/historical fiction. But as we have seen with such books as Frederick Reiken’s DAY FOR NIGHT and Nicole Krauss’s more postmodern GREAT HOUSE, as well as Death as a narrator in Markus Zusak’s THE BOOK THIEF, the only unwritten rules are to grip the reader in a credible story and to edify through words. Winer has done both, and he puts his unique stamp on it with his fluid, page-turning, thriller style blended with his out-of-the-box imagination and mellifluous prose. Like Plath did so craftily with THE BELL JAR, Winer will reach a wider audience by his hewing of the elevated with the pedestrian. Saul Bellow meets Stephen King. I applaud his ambitious style, which he succeeded with on many levels. Two stories parallel and merge, reaching forward in one, backward in the other, fusing in a transmigration of redemption.

October 26, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Facing History, Literary, World Lit

DEATH OF THE ADVERSARY by Hans Keilson

What is the relationship between persecutors and their victims? In THE DEATH OF THE ADVERSARY – poised on the brink of what soon will be one of the world’s most horrific tragedies – an unnamed narrator in an unnamed country reflects on an unnamed figure who will soon ascend to power. Although the figure (“B”) is never revealed, it soon becomes obvious that he is Hitler and that the narrator is of Jewish descent.

October 22, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Allegory/Fable, Classic, Facing History, Germany, World Lit