craig robert martin

The World: A Family History by Simon Sebag Montefiore My rating: 5 of 5 stars The World - Simon Sebag Montefiore "A world historian, wrote al-Masudi in ninth-century Baghdad, is like ‘a man who, having found pearls of all kinds and colours, gathers them together into a necklace and makes them into an ornament that its possessor guards with great care’." Simon Sebag Montefiore’s "The World" is an ambitious and exhaustive chronicle that spans the vast expanse of human history, from the dawn of modern human civilization to the recent conflict in Ukraine. While Montefiore himself concedes that "there is such a thing as too much history," this hefty tome is packed with fascinating and delightful historical pearls that make the lengthy read worthwhile. Some of the connections are surprising, and some of the chance events have resulted in the Geo-political map we use today. The book is full of etymology - from how writing de...

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen My rating: 4 of 5 stars Of the many motifs and themes running through this book, two stand out at the beginning: exclusion and friendship. Exclusion quickly turns to friendship, as three Vietnamese boys pledge their loyalty in a blood pact. One boy, our narrator, is an outsider as he is the product of the Church, the French, and Vietnam. He is ‘Bui Do’ - the dust of the earth (a phrase later encapsulated in the heart-wrenching song in Cameron Mackintosh’s Miss Saigon .) The other two boys sympathize and rescue him from bullying at school, and they become fast and firm friends. However, the scars of adolescent unity never seem to heal in the humidity of 1970s Vietnam. Sympathy is a title theme bleached throughout the book, yet it is unclear who the sympathizer is and with whom we should sympathize the most. The defeated French, sipping Ricard and sticking to the old names of Saigon’s streets? The defeated American...