Blue sky, green trees.
Fantastic read, although you have to be ready for it. See, it's not just about a whaling adventure, the book is about all sorts of things that happen around the adventure. It has chapters describing different types of whales, and different parts of whales, and chapters that have nothing to do with whales or hunting them but instead philosophize about this or that. The book is an adventure story, a history lesson, a natural history guide, with a healthy dose of exploration of the human mind and spirit. Be open to it all, and you'll have a great time with this book.
Note: Each chapter is only a handful of pages long, so everything is pretty short and snappy for such a long book.
Hell of a good book. The sleeping around and divorce aspects were surprising because I had always been taught that up until the boomer generation it was deeply shameful to be divorced or to sleep around, and that there were serious social consequences for it. This book is another indication, among many, that this is simply not the case. Interesting, entertaining. Highly recommend.
Wow, I did not see this book coming. It was our July book club selection, and while I was perfectly happy to read it I didn't have very high expectations. I figured it would be slice-of-life, heavy on descriptions and short on action, and the start of the book bore this out. However, things take an unexpected turn and the pace really picks up. Then it picks up even more, and keeps on going. I have to dock it half a star because there were still lots of overly-long descriptions, whole pages-worth of descriptions, that I had to skim/skip to keep in the flow. Otherwise a damn fine book.
Based on the description and a conversation with a friend who had already read it, I was fully prepared to hate this book but heroically muddle through for the sake of Book Club. I was pleasantly surprised to find it entertaining and fun. If someone was looking for a book to read in general, this wouldn't be my first suggestion, but if they were looking for a Berlin book then this would be in my top 3 suggestions.
The stream of consciousness style is usually a deal-breaker for me, but I stuck it out with this book and I'm glad I did. I don't know of any other books that addresses the topic of what happens to former colonists when they are violently expelled and return to the motherland. It was quite interesting, didn't pull punches, and took only one easy out. In all a good read, would recommend.
Fantastic book, absolutely fascinating look at Berlin. It definitely opened my eyes a bit to how the squat situation developed here, and due to the context that the book provided it made me view the squats and squatters in Berlin slightly more favorably than before. I mean, I understand now how things developed the way they did, and that at the time it was actually even necessary in some ways. It also blew my mind to learn that there were different types of squats, it wasn't just uniform chaos, everyone sleeping on a dirty mattress on the floor and shooting up then going on the streets and stomping people. This book definitely helped fill in some of the pieces of Berlin's history that I was missing before, and it was all told in an engaging, personable way. Highly recommend.
There is a lot of filler info to round out the page count of this book. If you are interested in learning all the context of what was going on, including political, sociological, and familial histories that go back decades before the action, then you'll gobble up this book. Otherwise you'll need to skim heavily, which is what I did.
Fantastic read, absolutely knocked my socks off. The portion that is told from the point of view of Edith was really intense, it felt like I was holding my breath for the whole chapter. I love what the author did with the characters, the plot, the writing, every bit of it worked for me. Highly recommend.
Fantastic book. I thought the parts from Doc's perspective while he was having his stroke were really well done, very intense, although sometimes hard to follow (I think that was the point, though). I also thought Anna's response was very realistic, feeling trapped in the situation and cut off and overwhelmed. She's also a bit of an odd duck herself, what with often not understanding context or appropriate responses, but I liked it, she was interesting.
Based on the hype and a glowing recommendation from a dear friend, I had high hopes for this book. Instead it fell flat for me. It seems that I was supposed to be very moved by the author's personal struggles, but they weren't talked about in enough depth, or often enough, or with too little emotion. These struggles just weren't interesting and frankly didn't feel like they belonged in what was clearly a book about David Starr Jordan. Overall, the book was flat and a little dull.