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grawk

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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Not exactly a glowing review :D I'm enjoying it so far, though I definitley don't think it ranks among their best.

I've wanted them to use more of Constance Green's character throughout the series. Here you have such a unique character... Someone who is learned, spending around a hundred years in isolation, reading endlessly, but has a naivet?... Someone who has a weariness from having been through so much, and appears wise beyond her years because outwardly she's a twenty year old girl. She's sort of a living anachronism who has a ton of potential as a character, and I have to say that they've squandered her so far. It seems they're content using her as a sidekick with but a few memorable moments.

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Karen Chance -- very enjoyable, she has me laughing out loud at various moments, and then shifts to bloody gorey horror in a single step. Sort of the author equivalent of Joss Whedon.

"Well, I can tell them that you tried to force me to tell them where Tony is and then trashed the place...no, wait, that would be true."

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  • 1 month later...

I've been trying to read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell after finding a hardcover copy of it at a Border's outlet for $4. Unfortunately, due to its size, it's not exactly the easiest book to read in bed, where I do most of my non-work reading.

perhaps my favorite book of the past few years. enjoy!

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  • 3 weeks later...

Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia

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"Russia's story of death has been obscured so often," explains Merridale (Perestroika: The Historical Perspective; Moscow Politics and the Rise of Stalin). The extraordinary scale of the violence and loss in modern Russian history has been shrouded in secrecy; indeed, the government has only recently acknowledged the hundreds of thousands killed under Stalin. "For 50 years," Merridale writes, "until the fall of Communism, families had kept bereavement of this kind to themselves.... It was dangerous, after all, to mourn the passing of an enemy of the people." Paying particular attention to the ways that Orthodox religion and Soviet atheism have affected Russian bereavement, Merridale explores Russian perceptions of death and afterlife from before the Bolshevik Revolution, through both world wars and the great famines of the 1930s and into the present. Her fascinating study is based on intimate conversations with bereaved Russians, as well as interviews with gravediggers, funeral directors, social workers, doctors and priests, and meticulous readings of imperial archives, Soviet propaganda, letters, memoirs, literature and government documents. (As Merridale points out, much of this research would have been impossible 20 years ago.) Merridale scrupulously avoids imposing her own ideological or cultural prejudices on her subject. By turns solemn and grisly, empathetic and scholarly, this inspired work provides a unique window on Soviet history through the brutality, ceremony and silences of death.

Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Needless to say, not an uplifting read. But staggering in scope and scale.

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