The Night Shift by Alex Finlay

 

Review

It was an exciting and interesting read, but it didn’t reach the standard of Alex Finlay’s previous book.  The characters seemed a little silly to me.  Chris has been unlucky throughout the story, his stupidities hit him one after another by accidents.  Keller is the most sympathetic character, although with us, 8-month-old pregnant women don’t shoot and fight, but prepare to give birth at home or in the hospital.  So her role was not overly credible.  The police are not really investigating again, they are simply arresting the first person who comes to mind.  And I think if the suspect can't prove his innocence, she/he'll be jailed.  It would be more normal for me to gather evidence, and if it is certain that she/he is the culprit, she/he will be arrested.  But there were many such logical impossibilities in the book.  So no matter how exciting the story is, I’m not completely happy after reading the book, we got an average thriller.

When a Killer Calls by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker

 

Review

I didn’t feel the book was as interesting as the author’s previous works.  Many times I couldn’t decide if I was reading a true crime story or an imaginary story while I know this story really happened.  The author tried to write events for those who like fiction, and those who love true crime books, to follow the events from the perspective of the profiling.  I would have preferred a drier, fact-only report.  I would have been more interested in the sin, not in the profiling thoughts of the profiler, which seemed to sometimes make it not important for the perpetrator to catch him, but whether the profiling was true.

The Dark Queens by Shelley Puhak

 

Reviews

This book is “a work of narrative nonfiction based on primary sources”, so it probably does not contain the full truth about the lives of the two queens, but rather an imaginary reality that can be read from the archival records and other surviving medieval documents found in our time.

I also felt a little bias on the part of the writer, as he portrayed one queen as good and the other as inherently bad.  While there are sources that would prove just the opposite.  But there has to be a good and a bad hero in every story so that we always feel personally touched in the events.  And this book was like that, I was almost present in the throne halls, on the battlefield, I mourned with the queens at the battle losses, I cried with them at the death of their husbands and children.

It was the best and most interesting historical nonfiction of all I have read so far.  I have come to know a world and an age that has been unknown to me so far, a bloody and chaotic era in French history that was still the starting point of current French and European history.  The two queens were pragmatic and ruthless, yet we feel that romance, love of family and nation were also present in their lives.  For virtually half a century, they ruled much of the continent, yet their lives were erased from the pages of the history books by jealous descendants.

There are a lot of events and characters in the book, no pages, no sentences that would be a little boring.  We always believe that the present is the most tortuous, the most interesting, and then we realize that there were times when the lives and destinies of peoples and nations were in constant turmoil.

Thanks to Netgalley and Head of Zeus for the opportunity to read this book before it is officially published.

Missing Presumed Murdered by Dick Kirby

 

Review

I was hoping to read interesting and exciting true crime stories.  Instead, I got dry case reports that were completely uninteresting to me.  The crimes themselves could probably be interesting, but not in this form.  I even gave up the book at 20%, I didn’t want to torment myself with further reading.  In my opinion, it would have been better if the writer had processed fewer cases and had the help of a professional editor.

Life and Death on the Eastern Front by Anthony Tucker Jones & Ian Stewart Spring

 

Review

The Second  World War is the best documented war in history.  War correspondents, press photographers, propagandists, soldiers and civilians carrying their cameras all sought the opportunity to capture the tumultuous events of 1939-45.

In this book we can see a selection of color photos taken by German soldiers on the Eastern Front.  Within this, we can get acquainted mainly with the various combat equipment, trucks, tanks and airplanes.  It paints a bit of an idyllic picture, a bit like a series of snapshots of an exciting adventure.  The horrors of the war do not appear, the many crimes committed by the German soldiers, we do not see pictures of the fighting, the executions, the concentration camps, the bombed cities.  These images are interesting, presenting an almost idyllic image in which German soldiers appear in a positive role.  Meanwhile, we know that was not the reality.

Silent Parade by Keigo Higashino

 

Review

In my opinion, the writer relied on Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express book and wrote a version of it placed in a Japanese setting.  That is why I am also expressing my criticism in comparison to this story.  To be honest, Japanese society and culture have always been sympathetic to me, I feel like I should have been born there more, my thinking and ideas are close to that.  This is why the slow, systematic and yet effective thinking that manifests itself in the actions of both the perpetrators and Professor Yukawa does.  Because in this story, it is not the investigators who are the positive actors, but the victims who become criminals.  I felt the role of the police was secondary and unethical, I didn’t understand why the good was being persecuted with all their might, and they were reassured that the evil, the killer, could not be imprisoned.  Therefore, the victims must unite so that the wicked will receive a worthy punishment.  Here, too, the dilemma arises as to whether we can expect the state, the judicial system, to deliver justice.  That would be his job.  But our experience is that if we want to deliver justice, we have to take care of it ourselves.

The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve by Stephen Greenblatt

 

Review

Greenblatt has already dazzled me with his previous book, that concentrated knowledge, in such an orderly form, in a logical arrangement, tries to convince its reader that he is sharing something with him.  Of course, this is not true, as it only summarizes pre-existing knowledge and leads it along a logical chain of thought.  Sure, there are those who say it’s just Greenblatt’s vision, and they’d see these connections quite differently, but since the chemtrailes have fluttered to nothing on the edge of the earth, I’m just trusting my common sense.

This book analyzes one of the oldest myths.  Mankind has always been preoccupied with where we came from (although perhaps we would go further with it to deal with where we are going, there is still room for correction) and the origins of Adam and Eve in Christian culture - even though there are few today who believe in  in its literal meaning - was forever embedded in the common consciousness.  Even if not in a religious sense, but in a cultural sense, Adam and Eve still symbolize man and woman.

Greenblatt goes through history and takes stock of every major change the interpretation of the myth has gone through.  St. Augustine put his life on it to prove a literal interpretation of Genesis with moderate success.  We get a lengthy analysis of the artist’s depictions of the first human couple, including the image of the famous Dürer, who wanted to be the depiction of the physical perfection of Adam and Eve.  We get a good lengthy analysis of Milton’s Paradise Lost, (actually, a mini-Milton biography is incorporated into the book by Greenblatt), and then comes the scientific discoveries that have begun to undermine the myth, with Darwin in closing.

It can be said that Greenblatt immerses quite extensively and has packed a lot into this book that only touches on the story of the first human couple, so perhaps this book may not seem compiled enough for everyone, but in fact Greenblatt is not simply exploring an ancient myth, but  human thinking, if you will, writes the story of the Enlightenment.  How a tale becomes a dogma, a weapon, and how this weapon is deactivated by advanced thinking.