Apr 29 2019
Rivers of London introduces Peter Grant, a young policeman in London who is just finishing up an undistinguished starting round of assignments when he is asked to stand guard at a pre-dawn murder site and things go, as they say, a bit sideways. “Sometimes I wonder whether, if I’d been the one that went for …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/04/29/rivers-of-london-by-ben-aaronovitch/
Apr 27 2019
The Lady of the Lake brings to a close the extended sequence of novels centering on the Witcher Geralt of Rivera and Ciri the child of destiny, although Sapkowski has written another book of stories, Season of Storms set earlier in Geralt’s personal chronology. The series has its ups and downs: I thought that Baptism …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/04/27/the-lady-of-the-lake-by-andrzej-sapkowski/
Apr 26 2019
I wanted to like The Road to Unfreedom a lot more than I did. The book is billed as a “chronicle of the rise of authoritarianism from Russia to Europe and America.” Snyder is a well-regarded historian with big works of synthesis to his credit — Bloodlands and Black Earth — plus a volume On Tyranny …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/04/26/the-road-to-unfreedom-by-timothy-snyder/
Apr 18 2019
The Underground Railroad is a hell of a book. Like Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters, Whitehead’s book was published in 2016 and takes a slightly science fictional look at slavery in the United States of America. Winters’ narrative brought slavery into the 21st century and imagined what the peculiar institution would be like in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/04/18/the-underground-railroad-by-colson-whitehead/
Apr 15 2019
Having recently written a national history of Ukraine, Plokhy turns his attention to the history of the junior eastern Slavic nation, Russia. A fair portion of Lost Kingdom describes how and why my opening sentence would outrage Russian ideologues, rulers and historians. The titles of the book’s sections reveal important aspects of his argument: Inventing …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/04/15/lost-kingdom-by-serhii-plokhy/
Apr 07 2019
Head On follows Lock In as a near-future, science fictional mystery in a world in which a pandemic (“Haden’s disease”) has killed many millions of people and left millions more alive and conscious, but with no control of their voluntary nervous system, locked into themselves. A crash research program has delivered enough advances in the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/04/07/head-on-by-john-scalzi/
Apr 05 2019
I’ve been to this border before, though I’ve never been to the particular corner of Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece that Kapka Kassabova visits. “But the initial emotional impulse behind my journey was simple: I wanted to see the forbidden places of my childhood, the once-militarised border villages and towns, rivers and forests that had been …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/04/05/border-by-kapka-kassabova/
Apr 04 2019
In The Color of Law Richard Rothstein lays out the case that segregated patterns of residence in every part of the United States are not the result of impersonal market forces, not just the result of patterns of individual choices among large numbers of people, but are instead the result, often the intended result, of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/04/04/the-color-of-law-by-richard-rothstein/
Apr 01 2019
I nearly set this one down about a third of the way through. The violence just seemed gratuitous, played for yuks (and for yucks), divorced from anything meaningful going on in the story. I stuck with it because I was curious about some of the characters and, to be honest, because the book isn’t that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/04/01/the-library-at-mount-char-by-scott-hawkins/
Mar 23 2019
This is another novel whose story I could have easily wandered in and out of, with just a minor tweak or two. Sarah Zuckerman, the protagonist of You Are One of Them, works for an English-language newspaper in Moscow in the mid-1990s. My newspapers were in Budapest, and I didn’t relocate to Moscow for another …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/03/23/you-are-one-of-them-by-elliott-holt/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire