Stephen Joyce
The Map of Lost Memories, by Kim Fay
Reviewed on October 20, 2012
There really isn’t anywhere quite like Angkor Wat. Imagine losing the Vatican in a jungle for a few centuries and then finding it again, surrounded by the ruins of ancient Rome, all so overgrown with foliage that creeper vines have worked their way between the walls and formed a symbiosis of root and stone, with [...]
Peter the Great: His Life and World, by Robert K. Massie
Reviewed on October 18, 2012
After the Cold War, many thought Russia would simply adopt liberal democracy and capitalism and stop being the West’s strange half-brother. This concept of history showed little concept of Russia, a continent unto itself that stretches further east than China while playing a pivotal role in European history. The melange of influences can be seen [...]
The Yin Yang Tattoo, by Ron McMillan
Reviewed on October 13, 2012
In the past ten years, Korean pop culture has started having a global impact. Korean films such as Old Boy and Samaritan Girl have won awards at international film festivals, the slick choreography and sexiness of K-pop has gained remarkable popularity, and Korean stars of stage and screen are the leading pin-ups across the Far [...]
Close Your Eyes, by Ewan Morrison
Reviewed on September 29, 2012
Occupy Wall Street didn’t achieve much, but it showed what probably happened to all those anarchist hippy communes from the 1960s and 1970s – their members got tired of sleeping in badly constructed tents, repeatedly fought with each other about their goals, and quietly slipped away back into society. Personally, I refuse to credit any [...]
The Collini Case, by Ferdinand von Schirach
Reviewed on September 25, 2012
The facts in the Collini case are simple. Fabrizio Collini is a 63 year-old Italian man with no criminal record who has quietly worked as a master toolmaker for Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart for his entire career. One day he enters a hotel posing as a journalist to interview an 85 year-old German industrialist called Meyer. [...]
The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace
Reviewed on July 25, 2012
Where does power lie in the modern world? Popular culture likes to show us ruthless titans of industry, Machiavellian political kingmakers, and heroic grassroots organizations resisting the twin pressures of corporate capitalism and Big Brother. But we know these images are false. That’s why they appear so often in fiction. The grotesque truth is that [...]
How to Forget, by Marius Brill
Reviewed on July 12, 2012
Three things typically instill dread in me when browsing at the bookstore: the unstoppable growth of the Vampire/Romance section; Jamie Oliver’s face beaming like Big Kitchen Brother from every cover in the cookery section; and any book advertised as “genuinely funny.” I have even seen this epithet applied to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which [...]
A Glimpse of the Numinous, by Jeff Gardiner
Reviewed on June 10, 2012
The ‘numinous’, as defined by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy, describes a mysterium both terrifying and fascinans. Jeff Gardiner’s debut collection of short stories provides us with glimpses of a world that is mysterious, fearful and fascinating. The characters in his stories cry out for the numinous, which brings [...]
172 Hours on the Moon, by Johan Harstad
Reviewed on May 28, 2012
When I was younger I was a huge fan of horror stories, but there was no such thing as a ‘young adult’ horror novel. Going from The Famous Five to Stephen King’s The Shining was a bit of a leap, and my attempts to read HP Lovecraft stopped at the word ‘cyclopean’. Teenage fans of [...]
The Arab Awakening: Islam and the New Middle East, by Tariq Ramadan
Reviewed on May 27, 2012
In the modern age, the highest goal of every intellectual is to be a media pundit. Once, a learned article in the press was primarily to advertise a new, in-depth book; now, the book is a way to advertise the intellectual’s capacity to write op-eds. Tariq Ramadan’s The Arab Awakening had the potential to be [...]
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Reviewed on May 26, 2012
I can only approach Vladimir Nabokov’s novels with a mixture of admiration and envy. How dare a non-native speaker write so stylishly! It makes a mockery of our privileged claims to the English language to see a foreigner casually drop words like ‘nictitate’ and ‘capercaillie’ into his prose, as if we all know what they [...]
Dead Aid, by Dambisa Moyo
Reviewed on April 28, 2012
What’s the problem with Africa? At a time when all other continents are forging ahead into a new millennium, Africa remains dominated by poverty, war, disease, and famine. It’s as if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are using it as a training ground for the main event. Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo argues in her [...]
Damage Fun: The American Zone, by Jens Duffy
Reviewed on April 18, 2012
Johann Fergal Bulhof-Murphy, the nine-year old son of an Irish-German couple, plays war with his friends in a small German village. They excitedly re-enact the last defence of Geesterheim and imagine themselves to be wielding rifles and grenades. They spy on advancing American troops and bicker over their attack strategy. And then the creeping suspicion [...]
The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman, by Flann O’Brien
Reviewed on April 7, 2012
Reading Flann O’Brien’s collection of short pieces, The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman, is like listening to a talented comedian tell a sequence of bad jokes. There are eighty-five sketches each about a page long that feature the same two characters: Chapman, an energetic entrepreneur and scientist, and Keats, a laidback poet. Generally, Chapman’s [...]
Or the Bull Kills You, by Jason Webster
Reviewed on March 19, 2012
The detective tale has undergone a curious evolution since its birth in the mind of Edgar Allan Poe. In the beginning, there was the crime, mysterious and seemingly inexplicable, which required a great but unusual mind to solve. In the hard-boiled genre of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, the crime was less important than the [...]
Solar, by Ian McEwan
Reviewed on March 2, 2012
Imagine that by the year 2050 the worst fears of climate change scientists have been realised: Paris, like a mosquito encased in amber, is frozen under sheets of glacial ice; sharks swim through sunken New York skyscrapers; wars over dwindling resources rage and fresh water has become more valuable than gold. Would our descendants not [...]
A second look at Tad Williams’ Shadowmarch Trilogy
Reviewed on February 28, 2012
Curiously, the most problematic issue for high fantasy is its lack of imagination. One might think that a wholly imaginary world with magic, monsters, and mystery would be the arena for boundless leaps of imagination, and yet each new fantasy series is comfortingly familiar, like a cup of tea by the fire at Bag End. [...]
Diplomacy, by Henry Kissinger
Reviewed on February 23, 2012
Scholarly books on international power politics tend to be hampered by the absolute divorce between the material and the author. As Cormac McCarthy likes to say, what is constant in history is violence and greed and a love of blood, but books about history are generally written by academics with a love of quiet contemplation, [...]
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The Bookgeeks Interview
Mark Oldfield
Mark Oldfield has worked in criminological research for over 20 years. He has a PhD in Criminology from the University of Kent and has carried out research in the areas of risk assessment and prediction and as well as evaluative research on policing, prisons and probation. He has also taught in various Universities on research, crime and criminal justice.
