The Seasonal Reading Challenge discussion

This is the thread where you can submit reviews for the Best Review contest. The thread is open for submissions and will close at Midnight EST on May 19, 2018. Voting will start the next day and run until the end of the GR day on May 31. The person whose review gets the most votes will get to design a 20 point task for the Summer Challenge.

To be eligible for this task opportunity you must have achieved at least 100 points on the Readerboard by midnight Eastern Time on May 18, 2018.

Just a reminder that each person can only submit one review - but you can make edits to your review up until the end. The review does not have to be any particular length and doesn't have to be a positive one (i.e. you can choose to review a book you didn't like).
Please include your Readerboard Name.

PLEASE DO NOT comment on people's reviews in this thread - this is for submissions only - you will be able to comment when voting begins.

SPOILER ALERT!- These reviews may include spoilers.

LAVENDER

My review of Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage written by Alfred Lansing narrated by Simon Prebble

This is an amazing story of survival, against all odds. Shackleton's hand-picked crew end up stranded in the antarctic region for nearly 2 years; no one was going to come save them, so they had to save themselves.

I kept having to remind myself that this really happened and isn't a fictional account of some crazy adventure. The book itself is written in a no nonsense, factual way, relying heavily on diaries and logs from the crew. No need to add extra dramatization here, there is drama enough while just sticking to the facts.

I recommend this to anyone interested in the history of exploration. There have been other books written about this, plus some movies; I'll have to take a gander at those next.

Task 20.2 -Rina's Task Option 2-Read a book from thehttps://www.goodreads.com/list/show/9...

Blood & Beauty: The Borgias listed on page 1 book # 60

loved this book! It was fictional-history with a soap-opera twist!

Having been raised a catholic girl, I did know the Borgia name. I did know the medieval church was a well of corruption. Sarah Dunant took it to a whole new level for me. In her epilogue she states "....the Borgias have suffered from an excess of bad press. While their behavior-personal and political-was often brutal and corrupt, they lived in brutal and corrupt times." She states that she drew her story from a host of modern historians, who studied the history with a more discriminating mind-set. If these historians went easy on the Borgias, I cannot imagine what earlier historians had to say!

15th century Italy was like a piece of pie, cut haphazardly into 7 or eight pieces. Each piece ruled separately by ruthless and brutal men. The Papal States were a small portion of Italy. But with Catholicism being supreme the Pope held power like no other ruler. With the death of Pope Innocent VIII in 1492, the throne of the church was up for grabs. Rodrigo Borgia, a Spaniard, had been waiting for just this moment. A Cardinal of the church, a henchman for Innocent, he was in the prime position to take over. The other Cardinals had their doubts. The main problem; he wasn't Italian. With force and bribes Borgia battled his way through the papal tribunal and won the crown of Christ.

Cardinals could not marry. There was nothing stopping them from having a mistress. Thus, Rodrigo Borgia fathered 4 children. At the time of his assent to Pope, all four of these children were at marriageable age. If you consider 12-17 marriageable! Borgia's plan: marry these children off to the most lucrative, powerful families of Italy and Europe and build a kingdom so strong, no one would be able to penetrate it. 3 sons, 1 daughter, these were his steps to wealth and power. It is a fascinating story, filled with wars, sex, family relationships and the church at the center of it all

When I read fictional-history, my phone is always near-by. I love to fact check, then grade the authors on their ability to get it right. Sarah Dunant gets a B+ from me. There were only a few things I could not verify. Of course she took liberties with conversation and events, but it's "fictional", so that never enters into my thought process.

I highly recommend this book to those of you who love history with a little spice!

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, by Timothy Snyder

Reviewed by trishhartuk. Five stars.

“History does not repeat, but it does instruct” is how this sobering little book begins.

I realise that there are probably some of the US voters who participate in the SRC may feel that someone living in the UK doesn’t really have the right to comment on US politics, and that’s fair enough (heck, it’s not like we don’t have our own political quagmire with Brexit!). However, sometimes it takes an outsider to realise when an author in the country in question has written something very important, and in my view, On Tyranny fits that description.

Published three months into the Trump Presidency, it uses examples from the Twentieth Century, from the rise of Fascism and Communist before and after WWII, to highlight some of the disturbingly familiar trends that were seen in the 2016 Presidential Campaign, and have got more obvious since Trump was inaugurated. The intention of the book is to raise awareness of the possible long-term consequences of the current US political situation, unless something changes and people wake up to the dangers.

The book is split into 20 short, memorable chapters, none of them more than five or six pages long, but each highlighting an individual danger. I imagine he designed them this way, so that even in the current era of ever-shortening attention spans, due to the sheer mass of information we get thrown at us on a daily basis, he can hold the interest of the more casual reader for the length of the chapter.

Each chapter follows the same pattern. He begins with an opening statement of the lesson he wants to highlight, such as: do not obey in advance; remember professional ethics; believe in truth and investigate; take responsibility for the face and symbols of the world around you; and be kind to the language. Next he offers historical illustrations of those individual dangers, and finally, he offers ways for people to remain aware of those dangers, and suggests everyday actions to resist the slippery slope. These actions can be as simple as making eye contact with people we speak with; reading books to keep our minds open to ideas other than just blasted at us in the full-time reality TV situation we find ourselves in; being willing to pay for print media or newspaper websites to see balanced reporting, rather than just listening to the loudest voice; using your vote; and supporting charities of your choice which try to improve things for the better.

Written in clear, everyday language, and at a mere 128pg long, it is an excellent study of what has been, and what could be again if we aren’t too careful.

Bryony’s review of The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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The Day of the Owl is a short crime novel by the Italian author Leonardo Sciascia. Sciascia has a reputation as an anti-mafia author and in this novel he explores how ordinary people behave in a society in which the mafia are seen as being above the law.

The novel opens with a man being shot dead on the street in a town in Sicily. It’s immediately clear that this won’t be a typical murder mystery novel as despite there being a bus full of eyewitnesses to the murder, not a single person will tell the police what they saw.

Captain Bellodi, the police officer assigned to investigate the crime, is from northern Italy and seems to be the only person willing to acknowledge that it’s likely the murder was carried out by the mafia. Bellodi is determined to find the perpetrator but he faces resistance at every turn from fellow officers, politicians and civilians who are all determined to deny that the mafia exists at all, let alone that the crime could have been linked to it.

Sciascia does a wonderful job at describing the culture of fear and silence that existed in Sicily at this time. One of the most memorable characters for me was a police informer whose terror at being caught between the threat of imprisonment by the state and death at the hands of the mafia is vividly described. Bellodi himself is a fascinating character and the scenes in which interrogates suspects are some of the best moments in the book, filled with intelligent and insightful questions.

The quality of the writing is superb, Sciascia was clearly a very talented writer. I had never heard of him until this book was recommended in another Goodreads group but I’m very pleased to have been introduced to him and I look forward to reading more of his work.

I rated this book five stars and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys well written crime fiction or who is interested in the psychological impact of corruption on both individuals and societies.