An American divorced couple, a judge and a lawyer, find themselves pitted against millionaire art thieves in a deadly hunt for the legendary Amber Room. This is an engaging old-school thriller reminiscent of Ludlum’s early books.
Alan Epstein
Epstein and his family moved from California to Rome and loved everything about their new home. I love Rome, too, so I enjoy any book about the Eternal City, but this one, while pleasant, isn’t terribly memorable.
Paul Collins
Collins and his family moved to Hay-on-Wye, the Welsh “book town” which has a population of 1500 people and 40 bookstores. This book is the sometimes superficial but often very funny result of his move. Collins writes of books as books, books as bookstore stock, and books as trash; he also writes about - and finds humor in - the British real estate system and British plumbing.
Anthony Everitt
Though this book is a brief but thorough biography of “Rome’s greatest orator”, I appreciated it more as a history of the fall of the Roman republic. It’s an ideal companion to Colleen McCullough’s historical novels about the same period.
Adam Gopnik
Adam Gopnik is a “New Yorker” writer who lived, with his wife and small son, in Paris from 1995 through 2000. I first saw this book at the Shakespeare and Company book shop in Paris and read it when I returned home. It showed me aspects of Parisian life that I, a non-Francophone tourist, would not otherwise have been aware of.
The book is a series of essays reminiscent of Alistaire Cooke’s “Letter from America” radio programs, though many of them are more personal than Cooke’s “letters”. Gopnik covers a broad range of subjects, from French intellectual life to the ways in which babies, specifically his second child, are born in France. He packs a lot into each chapter. For example, two chapters on the buyout of a favorite cafe give him a framework on which he hangs profiles of French waiters, meditations on French food and dining, and a comparison of French and American attitudes toward work.
Gopnik is a fine writer with an eye for telling detail. Each chapter is cleverly constructed so that the end recalls something introduced at the beginning - something which may not be the main theme of that chapter. The chapters sometimes refer to other chapters, and the whole is given a sense of direction and a coherent structure by the five Christmas essays in which Gopnik reflects on the year past and his son’s growth. Despite the fact that most of the chapters appeared as separate New Yorker articles, they are woven together so that the book avoids the disjointedness that sometimes plagues personal memoirs.
This is an extremely good book.
Vincent Cronin
I saw this book in the gift shop at Versailles and read it when I returned from France. It made me appreciate that Louis XIV was not just a builder of a grand palace, but was also the builder of a nation. Cronin gives the right amount of background and uses the right amount of detail for the reader unfamiliar with 17th century European history. The story never bogs down, but it ever seems superficial. Cronin seems a bit biased in favor of his subject, but perhaps he’s just a royalist at heart. “Louis XIV” is a nearly ideal “life and times” book: history told through biography.
