Reader’s Diary

John P. Irwin

The author was an 18-year-old high school dropout in 1945 and served as a tank gunner in the final weeks of the war against Hitler’s Germany. This spare memoir describes what he saw and felt. Irwin writes as the naive boy he was but with touches of the perspective he’s gained in the last six decades. He was a tiny part of a huge war and the book’s limited scope reflects that, but the story is interesting because it’s so personal.

James Charles Roy

In this book James Roy examines Irish history by focusing on the region around the town of Athenry, an area in which he owns a castle. Interspersed with the tales of Norman invaders who intermarried with the native Celts, became Irish themselves, and came in turn to be dominated by England is the story of Roy’s restoration of Moyode Castle, a stone tower he has owned since 1969.

Roy succeeds in illustrating the complexity of Irish history, but the book would be better had he spent less time on history and more on his encounters with modern Ireland. The history he covers, though it’s interesting, is a bit too local, and needs more context, while his fine and amusing descriptions of his experiences as a foreigner encountering Irish country life are not given enough space. This is not a bad book, but Roy’s own “Back of Beyond” is a better one.

Nicholas A. Basbanes
Non-fiction 2001

As the subtitle indicates, this is a collection of profiles of book places and book people. The places are libraries from the ancient library of Alexandria to the new French and British national libraries. The people include booksellers, librarians, and collectors. The book is more interesting when Basbanes is writing about people; while his accounts of libraries can be interesting, he does dwell a bit to much on dry topics like book storage. Any book lover will probably enjoy this book, but it’s not as consistently interesting as his previous book: “A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books“.

Iain Levison

In the ten years since Iain Levinson received a degree in English he’s held over 40 jobs. In this book he tells some very funny, slightly cynical stories about a few of them, ranging from bartending in New York to fish processing in Alaska. Levinson’s got a bad attitude - think Bart Simpson in the workplace - and he’s not the kind of guy you’d hire, but he’s a very funny writer.

Jeff Long

This book has a world-wide plague, criminal archaeologists, a frozen Neanderthal, Frankenstein-like genetic experiments, and even a clone of Jesus (”resurrected” with memories intact from blood found on a relic of the True Cross). All it lacks is a coherent plot with a beginning and end.

James Charles Roy

I liked Roy’s “The Back of Beyond” so much that I got this book despite not having any previous interest in Prussia. It proved to be a good decision. The book is mostly about East Prussia, a sometimes German, sometimes Polish land first Christianized by the crusading Teutonic Knights in the 13th century. East Prussia gave the world Frederick the Great and the Hohenzollern line of rulers that ended with Kaiser Wilhelm. Napoleon fought there. Stalin’s troops conquered it in 1945 resulting in a mass exodus of Germans; it is now part of Poland.

Roy combines history with a bit of travel writing and interviews with Germans who used to live in East Prussia. To the surviving German-speaking Prussians it is a lost land, one that they can once again visit but which they acknowledge they will never again rule. Roy chose his historical anecdotes to provide an overview that doesn’t get tedious. His travel writing is sketchy, but so are the historical remains in this much-fought-over land. Roy’s one fault of the his dislike for the Poles. He doesn’t seem to have connected with them in his travels and as a result his narrative is heavily slanted against them.