celticman's blog

I like books like this. Hidden history doesn’t follow the kings and queens route. I’m biased in that way because those are not my people. Have little to do with what I know. James Crawford suggests we look and see. ‘Just how much of the past still lives with in the present. An invitation to explore the unexplored and make pilgrimage to the lost and overlooked. An invitation to ‘use the country itself, as its own map’ Our mind doesn’t need to put...

I’ve read bits of Joan Didion’s writing and decided to read more. South And West translates into two sections on ‘Notes on the South’ and ‘California Notes’. She explains: ‘John and I were living in Franklin Avenue in Los Angeles. I had wanted to revisit the South, so we flew there for a month in 1970. The idea was to start in New Orleans and from there we had no plan…I seem to remember John drove.’ Her autobiographical impressions resurfaced in...

Tom Wright & Bradley Hope (2019) Billion Dollar Whale. Few economics books top the New York Times Bestseller list. Billion Dollar Whale fits into another category of True Crime. Twenty-seven-year-old Jho Low stole around seven billion dollars—give or take tens of million—with the aid of a Malaysian investment fund. Nobody was really accounting. Low had supermodels on tap and celebrity parties included the A-list of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jamie...

We all know who James Patterson is. A reminder is on the flyleaf on the inside back cover. He’s ‘one of the best-known and biggest selling writers of all time. His books have sold in excess of 400 million copies.’ You’re probably wondering what that’s got to do with American cops. Do a little detective work. You might not know (like me) who Matt Eversmann and Chris Mooney are, but it doesn’t really matter, their association with James Patterson...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convoy_HG_76 We know Britain wins the war. In the same way we can’t know that Ukraine will win its war. Hindsight blinds us. Angus Constam takes the reader back to a period in winter 1941 when it was all bad news. Nazi Germany had occupied most of Europe and Channel Islands. Britain was next on the Hitler’s list. The Royal Navy had been brought home to defend British shores. Despite Germany’s mass investment in a...

Vintage Classics has republished Babi Yar. A.Anotoli (Kuznetsov) describes Babi Yar as ‘a document in the form of a novel’. What the author means by that is in the first line of the first chapter, Ashes (after the Preface): ‘This book contains nothing but the truth.’ Kuznetzov was born in 1929 in Kyiv. His mother was Ukrainian. His father a Soviet who was relocated when the Germans invaded, 21 st September 1941. As a twelve-year old, he lived in...

I wasn’t sure I’d finish this book. I’m snobbish enough to continue reading because the author’s previous novel had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. There’s more than one way to being wrong. At the end of The House of Doors , I felt that flush of acknowledgment of being in such fine company. I’d need to look out for Tan Twan Eng’s other books. Let me explain my foolishness as the class hatred of the lies and propaganda of Downton Abbey and...

The Journey Home is a short book, self-published by Debbie Fanning. In subscript at the bottom of the cover is the message she wants to convey after being raped by two men on Burns Night, 25 th January 2003, when she was twenty-one: ‘Finding my voice and taking my power back after a devastating assault’. ‘ I’m OK. You’re OK .’ That’s the name of a philosophy and a way of listening and doing. It’s one of those convenient lies. Rape and brutality...

Where the Crawdads Sing is Delia Owens’ debut novel. A New York Times Bestseller and a Reece’s Book Club pick. Although this is Owen’s first novel, she is also a bestselling author of non-fiction as a ‘wildlife scientist’ in Africa. She lives in Idaho. Write what you know. It’s no great leap to imagine the young Kya, ‘the Marshgirl’. Her brutal coming-of-age marked by oneness and appreciation of the natural world not being far from what Owens’...

Part One of The Optimists, begins with a quote from Fergal Keane, Season of Blood . It was Rwanda, of course, Keane was referring to. The same place politicians such as Nigel Farage want to send refugees in the British Isles. The same place Fergal Keane admitted broke him. Here we have the first line: ‘After the massacre at the church in N—Clem Glass flew home to London.’ Clem Glass, an international photographer, is equally broken. A candidate...