The book is a bit ore dry than the documentary -the documentary is a must see. The book may not appeal to a wide audience given the leve of detail he goes into listing crops, cattle and climate to sustain his thesis.
Jared Diamond deserves a lot of credit for two number of reasons:
1. He did asks the right question, why some cultures /nations prevail in the modern world while others didn't?
2. He takes a very creative and convincing way to go about answering that.
I was already fammiliar with his thesis because of the documentary, so in that sense the book didn't gave much new. But I have to say that when he talks about mankind going from nomad to sedentary, then to form villages, and eventually kingdoms, he does stop to observe that we all believe that this was the natural course of events, that humans were meant to do so and the path that leads to cities and civilization was natural. I got the same feeling that I got when looking at the buildings in Egypt, chaos is for granted, civilization isa miracle.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes
11 - Man Booker prize finalist in 2011, a quiet gem of a book.
It starts telling the story of the characters when they are teenage boys at school, they are daring, pretentious and intellectually ambitious, dropping sentences like "phillosophycally self evident", and it reads as a restrained story of coming out of age in the 60's, nicely spread with culture and eager to get intimate with the oppossite sex. Then comes the relationship with the conflictive Veronica, which leaves a mark on the character, specially when she later starts going out with his best friend. Two suicides on the first part of the book.
Then, in one of the smoothest transitions I've read, Barnes pushes fast forward seamlessly 40 years, when the character is retired, divorced, a grandfather. He receives a letter from Veronica's mother. And this is where this book becomes brillient, by looking back at the story he just told, from a completely different angle, leading you to the plot twists with a gentle voice till the very end.
Really enjoyable read.
It starts telling the story of the characters when they are teenage boys at school, they are daring, pretentious and intellectually ambitious, dropping sentences like "phillosophycally self evident", and it reads as a restrained story of coming out of age in the 60's, nicely spread with culture and eager to get intimate with the oppossite sex. Then comes the relationship with the conflictive Veronica, which leaves a mark on the character, specially when she later starts going out with his best friend. Two suicides on the first part of the book.
Then, in one of the smoothest transitions I've read, Barnes pushes fast forward seamlessly 40 years, when the character is retired, divorced, a grandfather. He receives a letter from Veronica's mother. And this is where this book becomes brillient, by looking back at the story he just told, from a completely different angle, leading you to the plot twists with a gentle voice till the very end.
Really enjoyable read.
The plague of doves - Louise Erdrich
10. The best book I read in 2012. It was a 2009 Pullitzer Finalist.
The topic didn't seem very promising: the history of several characters in a first nations reserve in the 70's, but oh, boy was this book intense!
Each of the stories is engaging on itself, but the wordcrafting is superb, anecdotes of one character take another dimension when telling someone else's story later on the book. And the way it jumps from comedy, to drama, getting close to magic realism and horror at times it is very life like, those genres don't seem out of place, because life itself contains all those elements. I'd recommend this book to anyone.
Favourite scenes:
the little girl at religious school and the nun nicknamed godzilla; the tales form the grnadfather - the hanging; the sex driven preacher that gets struck by lightning; the faked kidnapping; the violin in the river and used to reform a thief; the psychology student reading Anais Nin and falling in love with a patient; the colonization of a patch of land during the winter.
The topic didn't seem very promising: the history of several characters in a first nations reserve in the 70's, but oh, boy was this book intense!
Each of the stories is engaging on itself, but the wordcrafting is superb, anecdotes of one character take another dimension when telling someone else's story later on the book. And the way it jumps from comedy, to drama, getting close to magic realism and horror at times it is very life like, those genres don't seem out of place, because life itself contains all those elements. I'd recommend this book to anyone.
Favourite scenes:
the little girl at religious school and the nun nicknamed godzilla; the tales form the grnadfather - the hanging; the sex driven preacher that gets struck by lightning; the faked kidnapping; the violin in the river and used to reform a thief; the psychology student reading Anais Nin and falling in love with a patient; the colonization of a patch of land during the winter.
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