Berkelouw Dozen
This month we recommend
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ALFRED AND EMILY – Doris Lessing
'I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.'
In this extraordinary book, the new Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor, who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital.
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A VOYAGE LONG AND STRANGE – Tony Horwitz
Long before the Pilgrims, other Europeans pioneered North America, seeking land, converts and cities of gold. By exploring America's lost, or often repressed, heritage, award-winning writer Tony Horwitz unmasks the country's founding myths.
A Voyage Long and Strange opens with the Vikings in ad 1000, but focuses on the neglected period in early American history between Columbus's voyage of 1492 and the Pilgrims' arrival in 1620. Horwitz recaptures the adventures of non-English explorers and the drama of the first contact with native peoples during this period. A Voyage Long and Strange is a gripping historical adventure that illuminates not only America's early European history, but also the memory and myths that give the past power in the present day.
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SEA OF POPPIES – Amitar Ghosh
At the heart of this epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, is an old slaving-ship, The Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean, its crew a motley array of sailors and stowaways, coolies and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, fate has thrown together a truly diverse cast of Indians and Westerners, from a bankrupt Raja to a widowed villager, from an evangelical English opium trader to a mulatto American freedman. As their old family ties are washed away they, like their historical counterparts, come to view themselves as jahaj-bhais or ship-brothers. An unlikely dynasty is born, which will span continents, races and generations. The vast sweep of this historical adventure spans the lush poppy fields of the Ganges, the rolling high seas, and the exotic backstreets of China. A masterpiece from one of the world's finest novelists.
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DEAF SENTENCE – David Lodge
When the university merged his Department of English with Linguistics, professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. He misses the purposeful routine of the academic year, and has lost his appetite for research. His wife Winifred's late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort and househusband, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them.
The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on the welfare of his eighty-nine year old father, an ex dance musician who stubbornly refuses to leave the house he is patently unable to live in with safety.
Funny and moving by turns, Deaf Sentence is a witty, original, and absorbing account of one man's effort to come to terms with deafness and death, ageing and mortality, the comedy and tragedy of human lives.
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PLAYING CARDS IN CAIRO – Hugh Miles
A unique insider's account of the drama of Muslim women's lives from the award-winning author of AL-JAZEERA.Recently installed in Cairo as a freelance journalist and expat barfly, Hugh Miles soon meets and falls in love with Roda, a beautiful Egyptian doctor, who introduces him to Egypt's favourite pastime, the card game tarneeb, to her all-female card circle, and to a previously unseen side of life in the Middle East's greatest city. While the women cut and shuffle, Miles listens to their stories and learns about what it means to be a young Muslim woman, dating, dieting and divorcing in a country where traditional Islamic values are in the ascendant. Yosra has an addiction to prescription drugs; Nadia copes with a baby and an abusive husband; neighbour Reem comes to terms with plastic surgery gone wrong; while her sister attempts to conceal her secret love-marriage from her family. Hugh Miles takes a fascinating sideways look at the lives of young Egyptians, and finds himself on a romantic adventure that will lead him to Islam and bind him to the Arab world forever.
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PARADISE LOST – Giles Milton
On Saturday 9th September, 1922, the victorious Turkish cavalry rode into Smyrna, the richest and most cosmopolitan city in the Ottoman Empire. What happened over the next two weeks must rank as one of the most compelling human dramas of the twentieth century. Almost two million people were caught up in a disaster of truly epic proportions. PARADISE LOST is told with the narrative verve that has made Giles Milton a bestselling historian. It unfolds through the memories of the survivors, many of them interviewed for the first time, and the eyewitness accounts of those who found themselves caught up in one of the greatest catastrophes of the modern age.
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RUSSIA – Jonathon Dimbleby
Russia may no longer be seen to rival America, but with control over a huge portion of the world's remaining non-renewable energy resources, it is a rapidly rising energy super-power. Yet, shrouded in myth and ice, it is little understood by the rest of world.
Travelling thousands of miles, Jonathan journeys from Kaliningrad in the west to Provideniya in the east to discover modern Russia. Passing through some of the most extreme landscape on earth, several climates and across eleven time zones, he visits places - spectacular, infamous, secret - that witnessed defining moments in Russia's extraordinary history.
In this book and the groundbreaking television series it accompanies, Jonathan looks at how Russia's past has shaped her current identity and investigates what modern Russia means to her people now.
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ARMAGEDDON IN RETROSPECT – Kurt Vonnegut
A collection of previously unpublished stories by Kurt Vonnegut, who died in April 2007, most of which are set in Dresden, the scene of Vonnegut's greatest novel, Slaughterhouse 5.
To be published on the first anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut's death, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of twelve new and unpublished writings on war and peace. Imbued with Vonnegut's trademark rueful humour, the pieces range from a visceral nonfiction recollection of the destruction of Dresden during World War II-a piece that is as timely today as it was then-to a painfully funny short story about three privates and their fantasies of the perfect first meal upon returning home from war, to a darker, more poignant story about the impossibility of shielding our children from the temptations of violence. Also included are Vonnegut's last speech as well as an assortment of his artwork, with an introduction by the author's son, Mark Vonnegut. Armageddon in Retrospect says as much about the times in which we live as it does about the genius of the writer.
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LIFE ON THE ROCKS – Philippa Nikulinsky & Stephen D Hopper
Back by popular demand, the latest edition comes in a handsome hardcover format. A book about the natural history of Western Australia. The text is by Stephen Hopper with exquisite illustrations by Philippa Nikulinsky.
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BOMB, BOOK & COMPASS – Simon Winchester
The seventeenth-century philosopher-statesman Francis Bacon famously declared that nothing had changed the world more profoundly than three great discoveries: printing, gunpowder and the compass. What he didn't know was that all three had already been conceived of and successfully employed by a single people, living on the far side of the globe, long before the West ever 'invented' them. And yet it was not until more than three hundred years later, in a young scientist's study in Cambridge, that one remarkable man set out to give these people the credit they rightly deserved.Joseph Needham was a keenly intelligent, charismatic young biochemist, working towards a glittering career at Cambridge, when he fell in love with a young Chinese student. His passion for his mistress quickly led to a fascination with her country's language and history, and he soon developed an astonishing reputation as a self-taught, albeit eccentric, scholar of Chinese culture. When, in 1943, the British government sent him on a diplomatic mission to help save China's universities from the occupying Japanese forces, he began the research that would occupy him for the rest of his life and which would one day lead him to write the greatest work on China ever created in the Western World.
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THE SEARCH FOR THE RED DRAGON – James A.Owen
"There's an old myth in the Archipelago," he went on softly, shaking his head. "A legend, really...I recall it mentioned a Crusade, but those events happened seven centuries ago. We always thought it was only a story."
It has been nine years since John, Jack, and Charles had their great adventure in the Archipelago of Dreams and became the Caretakers of the Imaginarium Geographica. Now they have been brought together again to solve a mystery: Someone is kidnapping the children of the Archipelago. And their only clue is a mysterious message delivered by a strange girl with artificial wings: "The Crusade has begun." Worse, they discover that all of the legendary Dragonships have disappeared as well.
The only chance they have to save the world from a centuries-old plot is to seek out the last of the Dragonships -- the Red Dragon -- in a spectacular journey that takes them from Sir James Barrie's Kensington Gardens to the Underneath of the Greek Titans of myth. With friends both familiar and new, they will travel through an extraordinary landscape where history, myth, and fable blend together to tell the oldest story in the world. And along the way, the Caretakers of the Geographica will discover that great deeds alone do not make heroes, and that growing up may be unavoidable...but growing old doesn't have to be.
$16.95 | To buy this book Contact Us
FLY KITE FLY – John Winch
Fly, Kite, Fly follows the style of Winch's most recent book, Run, Hare, Run, by exploring an unknown aspect of one of history's great artists, this time Leonardo da Vinci (who was famous for freeing caged birds). John Winch's highly detailed, stunning oil paintings–richly furnished with references to da Vinci's paintings and inventions–brilliantly evoke the early Renaissance setting, while his sparse text successfully conveys the increasing desperation of the struggling boy.
This was Giacomo's chance to prove himself. He gathered his father's old nets and traps and set out into the fields.But Giacomo's quest to impress his father and catch an evasive bird is foiled at every attempt because an old man is freeing every bird Giacomo catches. Finally Giacomo spots the bird he is after, perched in the window of the artist's studio. In his rush to catch it, the boy frightens the bird away. Then he sees something on the old man's table and has an idea. A delicious pun and play on words creates a perfect ending.
$14.99 | To buy this book Contact Us
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