I started reading this because of Philip Pullman's recommendation: "A brilliant, chilling and subtle account of religious derangement. Every self-righteous fundamentalist ought to read this, but of course they won't." And he is so right! This book is funny and then frustrating by turns, because of the amazing characters that Hogg draws -- you feel what they feel. I'm only halfway through this story and have no idea how it will turn out, but I'm completely sucked in.
Amazing. I'm halfway through this and can barely put it down to eat. A matter-of-fact, day-to-day telling of life at the Andersonville prison in Georgia during the Civil War.
Exactly what it sounds like, and plenty of it. Defensive caves from feudal times, dens of robbers, cliff dwellings -- if you find this subject romantic and fascinating, this book is right there with you. The author gives lots of historical context to explain why people took to living in caves and cliffs, and how they lived there. Might be a good book to read if you're a rock-climber or hiker.
It's basically the Futurama story: a guy wakes up in a high-rise building, a thousand years in the future. (Luckily, so does his pretty stenographer.) And so far as they know, they're the only ones left. This is a fun, overwrought survival-and-scavenging story -- but also, because the two characters went to sleep around 1910, it's a fascinating window into the pre-atomic, pre-civil rights, pre-synthetics American mind. Maybe because the modern past is constantly held up against the future here, the core ideas of 1910 stand out in relief, in all their sexist, racist, great-man-theory glory. So it's interesting as sociology, though there are some passages that are a little hard to take.
A tense little story about a history professor who finds he can see into the future. Careful details make the story come alive, and make up for some one-dimensional secondary characters. The story evokes the post-McCarthy-era university system, and the preservation of tenure rights is a big issue. So is the tension between hiding what you know is true but can't admit, and bringing truths out into the open before society is ready to hear them. It's a fun read.
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