Josh Herr USA

So far... Slow start. Don't like Taylor's style too much: Not very precise or concise. Maybe he's trying to write in a popular style and doesn't quite make it? But the book's question is intriguing even if i'm not totally sold on the validity of it: why are atheism, agnosticism, or other forms of skepticism and disbelief mainstream choices today when they were unusual in the West 500 years ago and earlier? What happened to change the conditions of belief? Taylor connects this with what he sees as the rise of an exclusive humanism over the last 500 years ("exclusive humanism" meaning placing human beings at the center of standards of ethics and value... I think... not very clear on this yet...). He limits his enquiry to the West, but I wonder if variations of his thesis would work for East Asia?

Attempts to locate a world of premodern Sino-Vietnamese intercultural relations between French colonial historiography that belittles Vietnam as a "little China" and recent historiography that tends to project modern national identities (Vietnamese and Chinese) onto premodern conceptions of culture and politics.

Still ruminating over this one... Kurt Vonnegut tells us that this is an anti-war novel, but it's not what you would expect. No preaching, no anguish, no weeping, no angry disavowals of war. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, gets unstuck in time and pilgrims through time and space. War as a defined moment in time slowly comes unravelled as Billy's war experience bleeds into and merges with the rest of his life. The absurdity of the ocean of war spills to the farthest shores where it wettens and is absorbed by the sands normal life, which is itself abnormal.

Not really a novel to find meaning in, at least not the meaning of allegory. The jumps in chrnology can seem not worth it at the beginning, but read on to the end. It's more about the effect. A difficult but worthwhile book.

1862: another title in the recent genre of alternative historical fiction. In the year of the title, the United States is in the midst of the Civil War/War between the States, and the British decide to enter the war in association with the South and against the Union.

The concept of the novel is intriguing and the plot is certainly fast-paced and entertaining. The characters, however, are poorly drawn, stereotypical, and sometimes embodiments of the authors prejudice. The female characters, for example, seem to only be interested and engaged in sex, despite their repeated insistence that they adore their lovers because they value their minds. Apparently the author didn't. Another example is the depiction of black slaves as only interested in killing white southerners. Yet another example are British politicians, who are depicted as cartoon-like cynical, pompous, and overreaching imperialists.

Along with that, the dialogue is atrocious. The political motivations of the British political elite that bring Great Britain into the war are also less than believable.

Finally, the plot itself becames less convincing as the book goes on. It is hard to believe that the Union would have as many lucky breaks in technological advantage as the author interjects. Even more incredible is that apparently, according to the author, Robert E. Lee and the other great military leaders of the south would have been LESS of a threat to the north WITH British support. In fact, in the novel, the south hardly contribute to the war at all; it ends up being a contest between the Union and the Union Jack.

If Robert Conroy is going to put such sub-par writing to print, he should at least avoid the crowded field of Civil War military fiction. Anyone who has read the Shaara trilogy will find reading Conroy's book a disappointment.

Verdict: Only recommended if you just want some cheap, quick entertainment and don't have any better book to try.

Short stories of an Edo inspector's cases give an engaging glimpse into Tokugawa urban life even if it is from the nostalgic perspective of an early twentieth-century writer. While the crimes and Hanshichi's solutions may not be the most ingenious in the global history of the detective novel, Hanshichi is full of humour, insight, and good nature--a character that grows on you. The stories are alternatively humorous, slightly eerie, or mysterious, but always gently entertaining and full of good cheer.