Rated of 5
by Beverly, California The Ghost by Robert Harris
I was stunned to see this book's rating. It is one of the best books I have read in months. The writing is deceptively simple and deft....similar to Graham Greene's style.
The "Ghost" is an English ghostwriter of "has-been" celebrity biographies. He takes on (for a very generous sum) this hurried assignment of an unfinished book about a recently retired English Prime Minister, a character closely modeled on Tony Blair. The rewrite and completion is difficult with elements of urgency, mystery and, possibly, danger, for the writer.
The characters of the "ghost", the P.M. his wife and his assistant are adroitly exposed. We are quickly gifted with an insider's glimpse of what would have been, should have been and could have been, actually never was. The outsiders' "truth" was merely clever "spin".
The dreary, wintry, Chappaquidick itself lends a mood of isolation and nothing-as-it-seems disquiet.
For me, the ending was shocking, but had certainly been foreshadowed. I have touted this book to all my friends and cannot understand why it isn't on bestseller lists.
Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
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Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
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Can an wiser, older narrator view the past with more wisdom than he might have possessed forty years earlier in the summer he was thirteen? Ordinary...
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U.S. ebook sales up in 2012, but rate of growth is slowing(May 16 2013) In 2012, trade book sales (i.e. non academic book sales) rose 6.9%, to $15.049 billion, and e-book sales continued to grow, although the rate of growth...
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