Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
Non-fiction that has not been adapted creatively. Primarily diaries and primary source documents such as court records.
Non-Fiction is a genre.
You can view all genres, or you can search by language/region, editor/translator, era/movement, book authors, or year of edition.
It is essentially Nadezhda’s account of her own suffering and her country’s under the murderous, oppressive force of a dictator’s relentless purges of all opposition. Of art and culture. Of intellectuals and anyone who got in his way or was inconvenient.
Of all of the forms of memoir that I read, I feel particularly drawn towards the diary. There’s something about reading the immediate thoughts of the writer as they live through and work through the moment.
Cloudland Revisited is a hilarious ode to the movies, including all of those bad and cheesy ones that we watch and then wonder why hundreds of people came together to produce such a clunker.
This week I’m going to review two McNally selections from earlier this year, both of which are delightful non-fiction reads that I wouldn’t have necessarily chosen off the shelf.
I’ve decided to review two of Didion’s works (partially because they have been waiting in my to-review stacks for a while, and partially because this is post #222).
A good non-fiction book is just as complicated to write as a fiction one and includes a mastery of many of the same elements. Writing style, writing technique, tone, and description have to be both well done and exist in an ideal balance. If so, then even a boring subject can be compelling. But, if not, even an enthralling subject can be completely dry and unreadable.
Every essay is a painstakingly, achingly beautiful construction of argument. From word choice to phrasing, he has a way of driving to the point, but also doing so with a biting simplicity.
Randi writes in a way that is accessible to the un-academic reader but is also like a cosy sweater for readers who have experience in academia and the sciences. Reading this book was a joy and a perfect meeting of my interest in the supernatural and my scholarly pursuits.
There’s nothing quite comparable to the experience of reading transcripts and re-printings of primary documents. To read a trial transcript from two hundred years ago and hear the echoes of words spoken so long ago by innocent women accused of crimes that are literally impossible to commit is something powerful and weighty.
Chernobyl Prayer is one of the most difficult books that I have ever read. It even took me a year to read it due to stopping and starting and the time I needed to take just to breathe through the amount of raw hurt and fear that she painstakingly documents.
