The book is about a revolt occurring in the late summer of 1831. In a remote section of southeastern Virginia, the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery took place. The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner. He was an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region.

The Confessions of Nate Turner is based on an extant document, the “confession” of Turner to the white lawyer Thomas Gray. In the historical confessions, Turner claims to have been divinely inspired, charged with a mission from God to lead a slave uprising and destroy the white race.

William Styron, of course, takes liberties with the historical Nat Turner. Nat Turner is a man whose life is undocumented, and so Styron created a life. And the book is on the whole fairly sympathetic to Turner, at the same time as it does not express such sentiments concerning Turner’s thoughts and ideas.

The book tells the story of Nat Turner and the uprising masterfully. But more than that; it is also a tale of some of the extremely agonizing and hard essences of slavery. Styron tells the story using the mind of a slave, and recreates and reconstructs masterfully in a way that makes this book a kind of literary history that conveys not only the facts but also the experiences of slavery. The Confessions of Nat Turner is narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution.

This is not a fun novel. Rather it is very dark, and full of ugliness and very negative characters from both sides of the divide. It is, however a very deep and penetrating novel, with excellent psychological analyses, that uncovers and lays bare motivations and shows in considerable detail some of the extremely dehumanizing aspects of the institution of slavery as it once existed.

The Confessions of Nat Turner is a great story that still deserves to be read. It is a masterful novel, an important novel in American literature, and a book that will forever have a special place in the literature of the United States.

Links to books by William Styron at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN. See also Bokkilden.no.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World continues to be a significant warning to our society today. It is, without doubt, one of the most brilliant pieces of satire ever written. It takes place on a future Earth where human beings are mass-produced and conditioned for lives in a rigid caste system. As the story progresses, some of the very disturbing secrets that lie underneath the bright, shiny facade of this highly-ordered world is gradually revealed to us.

The book opens by allowing a tour of the Fertilizing Room of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where the high-tech reproduction takes place. Then, into this seemingly advanced civilization, John is introduced. He is a “savage” from a reservation where old human culture still survives. Thus, Brave New World also is a tale of culture shock and cultural conflict.

Aldous Huxley

Huxley’s ironic portrait of a populace doped into Nirvana on “soma” (read Prozac and Zoloft), isolated and diverted by petty preoccupations in mindless trivial pursuits is shocking. The people of this wonderful society are totally unaware of the degree to which they are being socially, economically, and politically co-opted and manipulated.

The novel raises important and interesting questions: What can possibly be wrong with a world in which everybody is happy, even if there is no real free will involved? Is contentment really a goal to strive for? Are deeper meanings really important? What happens if all we seek is instant gratification and materialism? Perhaps the scariest thing about this novel is that in many ways humanity seems to be moving closer to its dystopian vision.

Brave New World is an excellent book and unfortunately seems to be becoming more and more relevant. Also, reading it is very refreshing, as somehow, even today, the book makes you think and ponder issues that one usually does not devote time to think about. In addition, it is a wonderfully written book; Huxley’s prose is clear, crisp, witty, elegant and insightful without being overly obvious.

Links to books by Aldous Huxley at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN. Linker til Bokkilden, Haugenbok og Tanum.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

The stories are all very different from one another, and explore different types of sexual encounters and situations. For instance, A Model is a story of a young woman’s progress in sexual awakening as she works as a nude model. The Queen is a story of a Parisian artist in love with and inspired by a famous prostitute named Bijou. And The Runaway depicts a runaway young woman who is taken in by two men who both begin to train her in lovemaking.

The stories in this collection are Little Birds, The Woman on the Dunes, Lina, Two Sisters, Sirocco, The Maja, A Model, The Queen, Hilda & Rango, The Chanchiquito, Saffron, Mandra, and Runaway.

The writing in each of the stories is eloquent, steamy and sexy without being crass. All the stories are easy reads. This, plus the fact that the stories are written by a feminist author, makes Little Birds a very interesting experience into the world of erotica. I liked the stories and do not hesitate to recommend it for its sensual stories. It is an incredible collection.

Praise for Little Birds:

“[It is] so distinct an advance in the depiction of female sensuality that I felt, on reading it, enormous gratitude.” –Alice Walker

Links to books by Anais Nin at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and at Bokkilden, CDON og Tanum.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

The very compelling tale of the Henry family, a North American family drawn into the very center of the war maelstrom, is a clever device for telling the story of World War II. The books capture the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of the Second World War better than any of books I know of.

Herman Wouk is an exceptional writer. Wouk’s characters are real men and women – not larger than life as we find them in many historical novels. They live, breath and sometimes die.

Wouk manages to cover virtually every aspect of the struggle for world dominance that World War Two was. We follow Victor “Pug” Henry, a stoic Navy captain; his duty-bound son Warren, a Navy flyer in the Pacific; his formerly wayward son Byron, a submarine officer who marries the Jewish woman Natalie Jastrow in Europe. And we follow the Jewish Jastrow family and see – perhaps experience is a better word – the hardships of Jews in Europe, as well as the Holocaust – with their eyes. And using a fictional memoir of an imprisoned German officer, Wouk also lets us see the war from the German perspective.

Some of the reading is very chilling. Wouk’s stunning descriptions of Auschwitz and the “relocation plans” for Jews throughout Europe are the most realistic and engrossing descriptions of the Holocaust I have ever encountered.

The book is long and huge. Over one thousand dense pages. But I have rarely read a historical tale so moving, gripping and engrossing. At the same time it is very educational – I thought I knew a lot about the war but War and Remembrance told me how little I knew. And what a way to learn history! In a great, exceptionally well written and exciting book like this.

I am glad these books were recommended to me. The are both rare gems. Perhaps War and Remembrance even more so than The Winds of War. They are based on exceptional historical research, have finely developed characters and intriguing subplots – all wrapped in a compelling language and told with great compassion by a master story teller. A very, very satisfying read, and one which touched me deeply.

Links to books by Herman Wouk at amazon US, amazon UK, amazon CAN. See aslo Bokkilden.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

The book tells the story of Constance (Connie), a young lady who married Sir Clifford Chatterley in 1917. Shortly after their honeymoon, he returned to Flanders to keep fighting in the World War I. When he returns home six months later he is paralyzed from the waist down. Connie remains at his side, but there is considerable distance between. Eventually Connie finds herself falling in love with Oliver Mellor, her husband’s game-keeper. He is crude and anti-social, and has an honesty and lack of pretension which Connie finds refreshing. He is also quite attractive.

This is not at all a dirty book. Rather it is a tender book with lyrical descriptions, but at the same time Lady Chatterley’s Lover is frank and explicit. The sex scenes are beautiful and not at all pornographic. Lawrence is more concerned with the emotional experience of sex than physical details.

The story in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is masterful at other levels as well – the book has accurate and very interesting descriptions of the class structure in England at the time, and with character descriptions that are very finely drawn.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is an excellent novel that deals with themes of love, passion, respect, honor, and the need for understanding. It is a masterfully written and complex character-driven novel. Highly recommended.

Links to books by D.H. Lawrence at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

According to New York Times:

Mr. Styron’s family believes it retains the rights, since the books were first published before e-books existed. Random House, Mr. Styron’s longtime publisher, says it owns those rights, and it is determined to secure its place — and continuing profits — in the Kindle era.

To be sure, this question applies to a large number of books, some of them very valuable commercially. The digital fate of e-book versions of most so-called backlist books seem to be open to dispute. This concerns books by a huge number of famous authors, for instance, Joseph Heller, Ralph Ellison, John Updike and others.

E-books, with no printing costs and cheap digital distribution, represent an increasingly attractive and potientailly profitable publishing channel. And, of course, the only one that is growing for the moment.

A major reason for this is that more and more readers seem to buy e-book readers. Kindle, by Amazon, is a huge hit. And now Barnes & Noble has released its own e-book reader, the Nook. The third major contender among consumers is Sony’s e-book reader, the PRS-600BC and PRS-700BC.

New York Times has published a comprehensive review of e-book readers, but these for the moment seem to be the major competitors.

Nook is the device on the top right, and below are pictures of Kindle and the Sony reader.

It’s hard to say which is the best. They all seem to be very good. Their prices are fairly similar too. I suspect that to a large extent it is a question about what your shopping and reading habits are and which company you have the strongest relationship to.

It will be interesting to follow what is happening in this area in the near future. Readers are faced with several good choices, and with more to come. Publishers and copyright holders, on the other hand, seem to be destined for huge battles in court until the merits of copyrights and publishing rights can be clearly established.

Links to the e-readers: Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Amazon’s Kindle, and Sony’s e-book readers.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

As many of the other most cherished books in world literature, Gulliver’s Travels is a book that has much to offer along several different dimensions. It addresses fundamental questions about humans and their societies, and brings a very satirical view of the state of European government, and of the petty differences between religions. As well, it asks the old philosophical question about whether men are inherently corrupt or whether they become corrupted.

Gulliver’s Travels spins a compelling, wild, intriguing and challenging tale of one of the most fantastic voyages in classic literature. It describes the four fantastic voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a kindly ship’s surgeon.

In the first part of the book, Lemuel Gulliver is shipwrecked on Lilliput, a strange land where the inhabitants are only 6 inches tall. Gulliver is a giant observing tiny people. There the rivalry between Britain and France is satirized.

Then he is marooned on the subcontinent of Brobdingnag where the inhabitants are giants. Now Gulliver is the tiny person in a land of giants, and he is exhibited as a curiosity at markets and fairs. In this part the insignificance of many of mankind’s achievements are there satirized.

And in the third part Gulliver is taken aboard the floating island of Laputa. Now Swift seizes the opportunity to satirize medicine and science altogether – Swift did actually not make up the crazy experiments he describes; they were all sponsored at one time or another by the Royal Society.

Finally, in the fourth part, Gulliver is marooned by mutineers in his own crew on the island of the Houyhnhynms. Here it is gentle horses who rule the land. Now Swift fires his parting shot at human society, and presents them in degraded form as the Yahoos.

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels has withstood the wear and tear of time and progress exceedingly well, in my opinion. It is a brilliant satirical adventure, and still a must-read for book lovers. An intelligent book with charm, whimsy and wit. A book that makes you laugh, as well as a book that makes you think.

Links to Jonathan Swift’s books at amazon US, amazon UK, Amazon CAN, Amazon DE, Bokkilden and Haugenbok.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

The setting is German Central Africa in the year 1914. At the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, the local German commander has rounded up the local natives and as a consequence closed the Christian mission run by the Reverend Samuel Sayer. The Reverend dies and his spinster sister, Rose Sayer, are left on her own. When cockney Charlie Allnutt comes to visit the mission, he helps her bury his brother.

Then the two of them sets out to go down the treacherous and wild Ulanga River in Charlie’s little steam engine launch, The African Queen. Rose wants to contribute to the British cause by torpedoing the German police steamer, Konigin Luise, which is the only ship of any size in the region and so completely dominates Lake Wittelsbach, the lake far down at the end of the Ulanga River.

Getting the African Queen down to the lake is more or less impossible. The journey by river has only been done once, by a man riding down the rapids in a canoe. The wild journey sees them facing the guns of a local fort, treacherous currents, raging rapids, insects, unfriendly leeches, malaria, near impenetrable vegetation, and a host of mechanical challenges. Rose and Allnutt, of course, eventually fall in love. And they reach the lake.

The African Queen is a very good book. A strange but great plot, basically two very different people more or less forced together by necessity, total strangers, setting out on a mission, fighting together against nature and gradually developing a relationship to one another. Very exciting, very interesting and very entertaining. C. S. Forester deserves to be remembered for this one as well!

Links to C. S. Forester’s books at amazon US, amazon UK, amazon CAN, and at Bokkilden and Haugenbok.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

In Beat to Quarters (the US title) we find Hornblower, having been promoted to Captain, on a secret mission to the Pacific with his ship HMS Lydia, a 36 gun frigate, to support a rebel against the Spanish Empire in Central America and damage the Spanish naval presence there, the Natividad. The Natividad is a 50 gun Spanish ship of the line, thus a tall order for Hornblower to handle. Yet his order is “to take, sink, burn or destroy” Natividad.

Hornblower soon finds that the Spanish noble is a little bit different from what he had expected, and that perhaps all is not exactly as supposed. The Spanish noble calls himself El Supremo, views himself as more or less divine, and tolerates nothing but absolute obedience. However, Hornblower has little choice in the matter. His orders are clear. So he joins forces with the madman.

Then he sets out the capture the powerful Spanish frigate Natividad, which is the key to Spanish naval control of the American Pacific coast. And, indeed, as it turns out he has to fight not only one, but two fights with the Spaniard. And both are spectacular fights, well worthy of Horatio Hornblower. The first is a clever night action. The second is a battle at sea with the two ships battling it out side by side with gunsmoke and roaring guns in a fight to death.

And when Hornblower returns to England, he carries with him a passenger he had to pick up in Panama, Lady Barbara Wellesley. She turns out to be a wonderful lady and, as well, an excellent whist player. So now the newly married Hornblower gets engaged in another type of battle altogether.

Beat to Quarters is a spectacular, very entertaining book. It is easy, when reading Beat to Quarters, to understand why the Hornblower saga so quickly acquired such a large following.

Links to C. S. Forester’s books at amazon US, amazon UK, amazon CAN, and at Bokkilden and Haugenbok.

Read more historical fiction book reviews!

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.

In the tragic year 1929, Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. And the primary reason was this novel, which he started to write at the impossible age of 22, and published in October 1901, when he was only 26 years old. As the Nobel committee says, “principally for his great novel, Buddenbrooks, which has won steadily increased recognition as one of the classic works of contemporary literature”. And herein lies almost a logical impossibility: That an author, less than 25 years old, writes a novel which is not only stunning in its literary beauty and composition, tells an important and entertaining tale, and also contains a precise and correct description of the “zeit geist” of a class.

Mann wanted to write a book on the vast differences between the world of business on one side and art on the other, and present it as a family saga. He was, supposedly, inspired by the Grand Master of European literature, Stendhal’s (1830) Le Rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black (Penguin Classics)).

However, Buddenbrooks ended up being something else. It became a novel that reflects and illustrates the transition between the 19th century realistic style and 20th century symbolism in European literature, and which is, in fact, a little of each. A rich descriptive work, a saga mapping the lives of four generations of a wealthy Hanseatic family with complex and detailed character descriptions, intriguing in its use of symbols, with a subtle irony in its tone. It is – as evidenced in the subtitle of the book – The Decline of a Family – a tale of strength, decline, degradation and decadence. The last Buddenbrook, the musically gifted young Hanno, dies of a typhoid infection and with him, the family. Was it the negative influences of the artistic strain in the genes of the Buddenbrooks that explained the decline of the family business? Do art and business require vastly different abilities? What is the relationship of spirit (Geist) and life (Leben)?

Buddenbrooks was controversial at the time of its publication. When it was published, the book outraged the citizens of Lübeck. They viewed the book as a thinly veiled account of local incidents and figures, even though Thomas Mann never mentions the name of the city in the book. But the book, as we read it today, is much more than a vicious report about the decadence of bourgeois life in Leipzig – it is a many-sided, almost ambiguous work of art that also contains a tender elegy for the old bourgeois virtues.

A true literary masterpiece that still shines in its richness and beauty.

Links to Thomas Mann’s books at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

©2010 The World of Books. All Rights Reserved.