Peder Bergstrom Bergstrom itibaren Sedlistoye, Astrakhanskaya oblast', રશિયન ફેડરેશન, 416366
A computer game (Betrayal at Krondor) based upon a book series... was turned into a book. I can't blame anything that meta that also has wizards named pug and describes the battles in the game in ridiculous, boring book detail. Turning the title around and adding a comma? Brilliant.
It find it hard to keep track of which books are which, but I have read this. It was pretty good. This is the one where it becomes clear to everyone, not just Zoey, that Neferet is off her rocker.
G
I love books with lots of characters and that each character has a story. This book has lots of characters. The only reason I give it 4 out of 5 stars is that there may be too many characters. The story is very good though.
The story told through the eyes of a 14 year old kitchen helper in the last days of the Tsar's families lives. The boy's name was Leonka and the tale is woven through the history of the end of the Romanoff's in Russia on July 18, 1918. The desperate hopes and prayers of the entire family; and the guilt of the boy. It was close to the things I have read in the past; the downfall all because of the Tsaritsa's loyalty to Rasputin.."the mad monk" and the Tsar's failure to listen and sign the request to establish a constitutional monarchy by granting a ministry appointed by his parliamenent. The pride of the family and their lack of ability to stop the Red's and the slaughter of so many Russian's under their new leader Lenin.
A friend once observed that many books of criticism have one large argument that gets articulated in the introduction, but that then gets dropped to make way for the individual chapters on particular authors. Plotz's book doesn't exactly fall into that pit (as did Esteve's book -- oops, I haven't put that one up yet): he keeps his eye on the major argument (crowds change in Britain 1800-1850, the public sphere is site of contest), but a lot of the book does get into the minutiae of particular authors, and while it's interesting to see what one critic does with the concept of the crowd, it's not really all that interesting in itself. (It doesn't help that he's talking about British authors I'm uninterested in, though it is very smart, which is what I'd expect for the guy who wrote my favorite essay from the Tiews-edited Crowds.)