How do we define genius? When do setting, season, motives become more or less irrelevant in a (very short) novel? Tolstoy packs in as much about life, death, marriage, caste and all the ramifications in one story than most writers do at 10 times the length. The subtle, brutal insights about human nature are astonishing; no wonder he was revered as a near-god. I’m not sure that any writer today can write with this degree of insight, subtlety and wit, too concerned about being politically correct, about being trendy, about being startling.
Wrote British poet Matthew Arnold (Dover Beach), "A novel by Tolstoy is not a work of art but a piece of life."
A minor miracle, this book makes death and decay funny. I mean, very funny. The term "hilarious" is severely abused today -- usually means something that cracks a smile, at best -- but this book is deeply, unexpectedly funny, and chock full of rarely arcane, fully relatable science.
Not to be read at night, though. Laughing out loud at midnight at death and decay isn't something that endears you to your partner.
For two thousand years, cadavers - some willingly, some unwittingly - have been involved in science's boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. They've tested France's first guillotines, ridden the NASA Space Shuttle, been crucified in a Parisian laboratory to test the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, and helped solve the mystery of TWA Flight 800. For every new surgical procedure, from heart transplants to gender confirmation surgery, cadavers have helped make history in their quiet way. "Delightful-though never disrespectful" (Les Simpson, Time Out New York), Stiff investigates the strange lives of our bodies postmortem and answers the question: What should…
I'd been planning a trip to parts of Europe I'd never been to before -- Romania, Albania -- and embarked on a crash history reading course. I knew these countries (as defined by borders today) were new; I knew the peoples and their history were ancient; that they emerged from the debris of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires; and that the Soviet era gave way to unrestrained capitalism, McDonald's, Peugeot and Mercedes, KFC and Carrefour.
What I didn't expect is this book. It's not really a history at all, more a collection of illustrative anecdotes. The themes are tied together expertly – prophets (Islam, Christian, and more), endless war, the supernatural — enlivened by anecdotes so unbelievable you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. What vampires really were: the dead risen again, to become monsters or simply relocate, remarry, change professions. How to be a productive, good tempered werewolf. How Jews flourished in the Ottoman Empire and were persecuted afterward. How Hitler was fascinated by ads for hair growth and applied the advertising dictums he learned to take things in very new directions. How World War II was a civil war here; the appeal, mystery and reality of communism. Again and again, the anecdotes are hilarious and heartbreaking. I could go on, but you get the idea. All conveyed in bejeweled prose. This is Nobel Prize winning material.
In light of Russia's aggressive 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a crucial, elucidative read, a sweeping epic chronicling a thousand years of strife, war, and bloodshed, from pre-Christianity to the fall of Communism—illuminating the remarkable cultural significance and richness of a place perpetually lost to the margins of history.
"Eastern Europe" has gone out of fashion since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ask someone today, and they might tell you that Estonia is in the Baltics or Scandinavia, that Slovakia is in Central Europe, and that Croatia is in the eastern Adriatic or the Balkans. In…
A white nationalist plows his car into a crowd of protestors in the once-peaceful mid-Missouri college town of Smithton, Mo. A clear-cut hate crime! And he’s whisked into protective custody by Fatherland Security.
So why is the Nazi’s lovely Lebanese lawyer being threatened with -- dead squirrels? And Pike by extremist goons? Why is a Native American Fatherland agent visiting Pike at 4 am? Why has Pike’s estranged mother decided to live with him? Could it be that Pike is a new father to a lovely little daughter? With no name?
Pike had better figure it all out and fast before the Nazis catch up to him and Smithtown erupts in right-wing riots, again, and his mother leaves in disgust. Again.
