Category: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

A review of Mastering Positional Chess by Daniel Naroditsky

We are given a good number of mainly modern games and positions, rather than the usual tired examples (or classics as they are sometimes called), with a fair number of them Daniel’s own. As you might imagine, Naroditsky’s annotations are especially candid and lucid when he comes to commentate on his own games.

A review of Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Though Millay plays to the gallery a bit, mindful that she has a bit of a reputation to keep up (Byron did it too), she is a poet of substance. This fine, generous selection of her poetry includes also Aria da Capo, a one-act verse drama about xenophobia and the suspicion of the stranger.

A review of Phoebe Nash, Girl Warrior by Justin D’Ath

Its fast pace and relatively simple vocabulary makes it perfect for struggling readers, but it’s also a pleasurable and powerful tale for good readers of all ages, coupling action with deep characterisation and enough plot complexities to keep readers reading until the end.

A review of The End of the Circle by Walter Cummins

These are bitter stories. All of the men, women, and children of the stories are imprisoned by circumstances. Redemption for the reader is in Cummins’s pitiless depiction of his doomed characters. Truth is what matters and he makes truth transcendent.

A review of Into the Yell by Sarah James

jpg” align = “left”> Throughout the book, the imagery is always powerful – drawing from myth, fairy tales, a painter’s palette, Blake, medical terminology, the beautician’s rooms, the seaside, and above all, the natural world.

The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

The Way We Live Now is drenched in considerations of money and Trollope carries it off beautifully. For once what people will do for money and how their desires can defeat, disgrace, and humiliate them escapes the boredom that money as a subject commonly invokes. The connections are intricate, admirably stage managed, and have an impetus that some of Trollope lacks.