Read the following novel reviews, Identify the
reviewer, the topic and the social function of each novel!
Review
1.
A BROTHERHOOD OF SPIES
Book Page Top Pick in Nonfiction, May
2018
The Cold War between the U.S. and Russia was
at its iciest from the early 1950s until well into the 1960s. Neither side knew
a great deal about the other’s military capabilities and even less about any
grand designs for world supremacy. The information the two superpowers did
possess came mostly from spies, diplomats, gossip and news reports. Although
securing reliable intelligence was clearly in the Pentagon’s interest, its
chief focus was on improving its weaponry. However, the nascent Central
Intelligence Agency was interested in experimental aerial reconnaissance
projects.
Into this jurisdictional minefield entered
four inordinately talented civilians who took it upon themselves to build and
test technology that might reveal what was actually happening in Russia: Edwin
Land, the inventor of the first Polaroid camera and a genius in the field of
optics; Kelly Johnson, an engineer who zeroed in on designing lightweight,
high-flying aircraft that could photograph the Russian landscape while,
ideally, evading radar detection; Richard Bissell, a Connecticut blue blood the
CIA assigned to oversee and facilitate the hush-hush project; and Francis Gary
Powers, one of the daredevil pilots selected to test the new spy plane, which
they called the U-2. Powers would later be shot down over the Soviet Union in
the U-2, sparking even more saber-rattling.
Among the more colorful characters traipsing
through this wide-ranging narrative are the bulldoggish General Curtis LeMay,
J. Edgar Hoover, the influential and socially well-connected columnists Joseph
and Stewart Alsop, the surprisingly restrained and canny Nikita Khrushchev,
John F. Kennedy and Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, who regarded Powers
as a coward and traitor because he didn’t kill himself before being captured by
the KGB.
A story as well told as Monte Reel’s A Brotherhood of Spies is an
irresistible call to binge-reading.
https://bookpage.com/reviews/22569-monte-reel-brotherhood-spies#.Wus7-siFPIV
Review 2
THE MAP OF SALT AND STARS
Two lives, a thousand years apart
Among the many things the violence of war
obliterates, perhaps the most malicious is history. Now in its seventh year,
the civil war that has turned Syria into the site of one of the world’s worst
humanitarian crises has also corseted one of the oldest societies on earth into
a kind of perpetual infancy. Syria, it sometimes seems, only began to exist
seven years ago, as a place defined only by its current calamity.
In many ways, The Map
of Salt and Stars is at once a testament to the brutality
of the current Syrian conflict and a reverent ode to ancient Arabian history.
Syrian-American writer Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar has crafted an audacious
debut, ambitious and sprawling in both time and space.
The book follows the story of Nour, a
Syrian-American girl living in New York. In 2011, after Nour loses her father
to cancer, her mother decides to move the family back to Homs to be close to
their extended family. But Nour’s arrival coincides with Syria’s slide into
civil war. Amid grotesque violence, Nour is made a refugee, a traveler through
Syria’s neighboring lands.
Almost a thousand years earlier, another girl’s story unfolds.
Rawiya, seeking a better life for her mother, disguises herself as a boy and
joins a legendary cartographer on a quest to map the known world.
The two stories unfold side by side, split by
time but joined by a common geography. Because the modern part of Joukhadar’s
narrative carries the urgency of the present tense, but the ancient half reads
like an old Arabian fairy tale, the dual story structure is at first jarring.
But soon the book finds its pace, and the intertwining tales complement each
other in ways a single narrative could not. A swooping bird of prey that
threatens to devour the ancient story’s traveling companions finds its
modern-day analogy in the form of Syrian fighter planes dropping bombs on
besieged cities.
There is a heartfelt quality to the story,
evident in the meticulous historical research that must have gone into the
creation of the ancient part of the book. The Map
of Salt and Stars presents an Arab world in full
possession of its immense historical and cultural biography, marred by its
modern tragedies but not exclusively defined by them.
https://bookpage.com/reviews/22549-jennifer-zeynab-joukhadar-map-salt-stars#.Wus9vMiFPIU
Review 3
WARLIGHT
Growing up in the wreckage of war
Learning who you are and, perhaps more
importantly, who you are meant to be isn’t easy. Nathaniel Williams, the young
hero of Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel, Warlight, spends
much of his adolescence and later years pondering this.
The author of the Booker Prize-winning The English Patient, Ondaatje
confounds his 14-year-old protagonist from the outset when the boy’s parents
announce they are going away for a year and that he and his 15-year-old sister,
Rachel, will be left in the care of a strange acquaintance known as the Moth, a
man they are certain is a criminal. In 1945 England, at the end of World War
II, Nathaniel and Rachel must adjust to their newfound parental abandonment and
accept the Moth’s warning “that nothing was safe anymore.”
As narrated through Nathaniel’s intimate
firsthand perspective, the siblings test their new guardian by rebelling at
school. But instead of meeting a stern lashing for their behavior, they are
surprised by the Moth’s calm understanding and protective demeanor. Equally
surprising is the cast of unusual characters associated with the Moth who wind
up staying at their house, including Norman Marshall, better known as the
Pimlico Darter, a smuggler and racer of greyhound dogs.
The siblings drift further from each other as
Nathaniel finds a surrogate father in the Darter and Rachel is drawn closer to
the Moth. Events cascade with the surprising return of their mother, Rose. But
this isn’t a cheerful reunion, as her abandonment and silence about her
secretive service in the war have a profound effect on her children and leave
more questions than answers—questions that plague Nathaniel well into adulthood
and long after his mother’s death.
Contemplative and mysterious, Warlight is
utterly engrossing.
Complete the following
table based on the review texts 1,2, and 3
|
Component
|
Review
1
A Brotherhood of Spies
|
Review
2
The Map of Salt And Stars
|
Review
3
Warlight
|
|
Name of Reviewer
|
Edward Morris
|
Omar El Akkad
|
G. Robert Frazier
|
|
Topic
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A thrilling dramatic narrative of the
top-secret Cold War-era spy plane operation that transformed the CIA and
brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
|
The story of a contemporary girl's
flight into exile from the Syrian civil war is deepened by the parallel tale
of a 12th-century girl.
|
A story tells us about 14-year-old
Nathaniel and his sister Rachel whose parents having moved to Singapore near
the end of World War I.
|
|
Social Function
|
to appreciate or to critic
a novel.
|
to appreciate or to critic
a novel.
|
to appreciate or to critic
a novel.
|
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