I loved this astoundingly vivid account of how a giant container ship sank near the Bahamas during a 2015 hurricane. I loved it because Slade makes the people she writes about people I can understand.
I’m fascinated by how people bury their heads in the most useless portions of jargon-laden procedures, and Slade highlights that dysfunctional tendency. I marvel at how people surrender to technology, like religious zealots ritualistically engaging in intellectual abdication.
Through meticulous research, Slade shows how this can happen. Finally, I can never get past the idea that people will harness all their mental energy to point fingers and deflect blame if something goes wrong. Slade delivers an unnerving case study of that.
In the tradition of The Perfect Storm and Into Thin Air, Rachel Slade's Into the Raging Sea is a nail-biting account of the sinking of the container ship El Faro, the crew of thirty-three who perished onboard, and the destructive forces of globalisation that put the ship in harm's way.
On 1 October 2015, Hurricane Joaquin barreled into the Bermuda Triangle and swallowed the container ship El Faro whole, resulting in one of the worst shipping disasters in decades. No one could fathom how a vessel equipped with satellite communications, a sophisticated navigation system, and cutting-edge weather forecasting could suddenly…
I loved this novel because Lucy Adler, the protagonist, is so real. When she’s walking around New York, I’m walking alongside her. When she’s talking about her favorite sport (basketball), I feel like I’m contemplating my favorite sport (football). When she’s talking about the boy who’s out of reach (Percy), I remember, many decades ago, the numerous girls who were out of reach.
As the book concludes and Lucy begins to come of age, I rediscover that sense of maturity that dawns as youth gives way to adulthood. It’s a credit to Czapnik’s writing that readers can experience such feelings so intensely.
An iBooks Book of the Year 2019, 'Our favourite debut ... a glorious, empowering, coming of age NY story.'
'An electric debut' New York Times 'Exhilarating' Claire Messud 'Deeply affecting' Salman Rushdie
Seventeen-year-old Lucy Adler, a street-smart, trash-talking baller, is often the only girl on the public courts. Lucy's inner life is a contradiction. She's by turns quixotic and cynical, insecure and self-possessed and, despite herself, is in unrequited love with her best friend and pick-up teammate Percy, son of a prominent New York family who is trying to resist his upper crust fate.
There’s an unsettling scene in Full Metal Jacket when his rifle so enamors Private Pyle that he talks to it, admiring the way it combines function with a form that is “clean…beautiful…smooth.” McCarthy’s prose haunted and seduced me in the same way.
I must confess that I was uneasy when people said McCarthy could be like Faulkner. I like Faulkner, but he can be a lot of work. Turns out that this novel’s style differs from Faulkner’s (and anyone else’s).
Finally, it didn’t matter that I tend to dislike Westerns and that this is basically a Western. The story, like the way McCarthy tells it, is unique, clean, beautiful, smooth, and unsettling.
John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilized; a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
The first volume in McCarthy's legendary Border Trilogy, All The Pretty Horses is an acknowledged masterpiece and a grand love story: a novel about the passing of childhood, of innocence and a vanished American…
Annie Kurtz joins the Marines, deploys to Afghanistan, and has to make a split-second decision. She can follow her orders. Or she can follow her conscience. Nick Willard is a journalist who has pined for Annie since they were in prep school together. While doing his job, he discovers what Annie did.
Together, Nick and Annie battle the half-witted strategies that made the wars on terror so frustrating, wrestle with conflicts between law and morality, and explore the tensions between love and friendship.
