Thursday, April 26, 2018

The Parasite

The ParasiteThe Parasite by Arthur Conan Doyle
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This short story explores the dark potential for mesmerism. The plot advances through the diary entries of a scientist who manages to get psychically entangled with a twisted, sociopathic hypnotist. Arthur Conan Doyle's style is rather stilted, but this adds to the plot more than it detracts. Good, quick read - available free as epub at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/355

View all my reviews

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Slaughterhouse-FiveSlaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This classic anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut is semi-autobiographical. The title is taken from the Dresden, Germany Prisoner of War camp building assigned to Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, after his capture during the winter of 1944-1945. Pilgrim manages to survive the Dresden firebombing while time-shifting to other life scenes in the past/future. This includes being abducted by an alien spacecraft and taken to the planet Tralfamadore many light-years from Earth. The Tralfamadorians treat Billy as a zoo exhibit during his time there, and are amazed by the Earthling's belief in "free will" - the aliens can see in four dimensions, seeing everything in the space-time continuum. This ability leads to a universal fatalistic worldview - death is meaningless, each human is viewed as a 4D centipede with a baby at one end and the death personna at the other - "so it goes".


View all my reviews

Darkest Hour: How Churchill Brought England Back from the BrinkDarkest Hour: How Churchill Brought England Back from the Brink by Anthony McCarten
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was written in parallel with a screenplay for the movie of the same title. It is a good read, with a central plot point of the "wobbly" nature of Winston Spencer Churchill (WSC) immediately after becoming Britain's prime minister in the spring of 1940. The book concentrates on how WSC navigated the crisis of May 1940 as Nazi Germany swamped the French military, isolated the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) at Dunkirk and threatened to invade Great Britain. I enjoyed reading about the "inside game" revealed by the author, especially the WSC relationship with his PM predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, and his foreign secretary, Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax. The attention, time and extreme care WSC spent on his oratory is also explored by the book. The final sentence of the Epilogue reveals the book's theme: "That May, Winston Churchill became Winston Churchill."


View all my reviews