This is a wonderful book about a struggling young couple and their child during the rise of National Socialism.

If you can get the audio book, it’s wonderful, though I’m sure I would have loved this book under any circumstances. I learned a lot about the tumult in Afghanistan over the past 30 odd years and the (sometimes) changing treatment of women with each new regime. A beautiful story about a couple of remarkably strong women.

I don’t know how I missed reading this at an earlier point in my life but maybe I appreciate it more now anyway. It’s a very moving timeless story and I’ll probably remember it as a sentimental favorite.

This is my first book by Robert McCammon and I plan to read others. The writing is exceptionally good, beautiful really and the book itself is an elegy to boyhood. One of the things it really made me think about was the way in which a child who is brought up in a sheltered world learns about tragedy and evil.

Yes it is slow at times but I’m beginning to think that Ian McEwan can make anything interesting and more importantly of some sort of significance. This is, I guess, McEwan’s book about how to live in the world after 9/11 and as you might expect his theme gives you a lot to think about.

I got part way into this and abandonned it. Maybe I’m just getting too old to enjoy twenties angst. I couldn’t help but ask myself – Is this the best book I have read or will read on this subject? And my personal answer was no.

This was the longest audio book (20 CDs) I’ve listened too although Ha Jin’s A Free Life (17) was close. I have to admit that when it began with Babe Ruth encountering a couple of Negro (the term used back in 1918) baseball teams I wasn’t sure this was the book for me. Sorry, sports fans:). Well the Babe Ruth parts were fairly short and scattered throughout the book and that was okay. The other two story lines concerned Luther Lawrence, one of the black men who played for one of those teams (a hobby only) and Danny Coughlin, a young Boston Police Dept. cop. This book was so well done, with a very intriguing plot and fantasic characterizations. I really learned alot about 1919-1920 in Boston, the end of WWI, racism, the “Bolsheviki”, who were inspired by the Russian Revolution and a number of other immigrant groups with their own grievances, not to mention the rise of labor unions. Luther and Danny’s lives become closely entwined with both of them encountering the Babe at different times. Strongly recommended.

I have mixed feelings about this book, probably because my own spiritual seeking is a pressing matter for me at the present time. I read in a Guardian Review that Crace is an atheist, and this is indeed an atheistic view of death as finality and the state of being dead as eternal I believe this is my second and now successful attempt at reading this book. I think the first time I was turned off by the morbidity and the excruciating detail given to bodily decomposition. Nevertheless I suppose it might not be a bad idea if we all lived like atheists. Maybe then we’d make better use of our time on earth.

Reading this book will actually make you feel sorry for the person arrested at the end of George’s With No One As Witness. I don’t know how she does it as an American but her depiction of lower class London society seems “spot on”!

If you are at all interested in reading about the post Cultural-revolutionary politics in China this is a must read book. The author is a Pen/Faulkner award winner for her first book (short stories). Like Ha Jin she writes in her non-native language. Her characters are so believable and their lives enormously sad except when touched by the kindness of a fellow citizen. This is a chance to learn more about a topic seldom explored in our fiction. Highly recommended.