AccessMyLibrary provides FREE access to over 30 million articles from top publications available through your library.
Create a link to this page
Copy and paste this link tag into your Web page or blog:
BRIEFLY NOTED.(Special Topics in Calamity Physics)(The Whistling Season)(The Wonga Coup)(The Human Voice)(Book review)
Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl (Viking; $25.95). The first hundred pages of this wildly idiosyncratic debut novel are a blizzard of obscure bibliographical references, apocrypha, Capitalized Words of Import, and nouns coerced into being verbs (a pen is not twirled but "triple-lutzed"). If the author seems overexuberant, her pyrotechnics nonetheless suit her narrator, a hyper-literate teen-ager named Blue van Meer, the daughter of a lady-killing professor and (shades of Nabokov) an amateur lepidopterist who died young. Blue chronicles her senior year in high school, when she is Svengalied by a clique of louche, privileged kids, united in their obsession with a mysterious film teacher. "Everyone is responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story," Blue's father warns her. She takes his words to heart, and her mesmeric tale, even at its most over-the-top, feels true to the operatic agonies of adolescence.
The Whistling Season, by Ivan Doig (Harcourt; $25). Set in 1909 in rural Montana, this evocative novel records, in measured bursts of illumination, what happens when Oliver Milliron, the widowed father of three boys and in need of a housekeeper, answers an ad placed by Rose Llewellyn, a charmer whose claim "Can't Cook But Doesn't Bite" proves true. Her erudite brother Morris, along for the ride, takes over the local schoolhouse and animates it with passionate teaching. Doig offers a gentle appreciation of the secrets beneath the surface of everyday life, set against a Western landscape that is described in concrete detail: a field is ready for plowing "when you can't see the frost on the ground by the light of the first full moon after the equinox"; a mixture of snow and dirt is called "snirt."
The Wonga Coup, by Adam Roberts (PublicAffairs; $26). In March, 2004, Simon Mann, an Eton-educated former S.A.S. officer, was arrested in Zimbabwe after trying to load five tons of ...
- The Wonga Coup.(Book review)
- Magazine article from: African Business August 1, 2006 700+ words
The Wonga Coup By Adam Roberts [pounds sterling]9.99 Profile Books ISBN 1-86197...ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In March 2004 Nick Du Toit confessed to 'the Wonga Coup'--an attempt to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea...
- The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs, and a Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in...
- Magazine article from: The Historian Schmidt, Elizabeth December 22, 2007 700+ words
The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs, and a Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in an...book makes the plot only slightly easier to follow. Nonetheless, The Wonga Coup is an important case study of what has been called the "recolonization...
- The Wonga Coup; The story of the abortive putsch in Equatorial Guinea has all...
- Newspaper article from: The Saturday Star (South Africa) July 8, 2006 700+ words
...bureau chief of The Economist, decided he had to write The Wonga Coup about the misguided, farcical attempt to overthrow the wicked...Greg Wales, an accountant and fellow plotter of ex-SAS Wonga Coup mastermind Simon Mann, who is rotting in a Zimbabwean jail...
- Lessons of the Wonga Coup.(News)
- Newspaper article from: Daily News (South Africa) November 10, 2009 700+ words
...oil wealth from his still poor people. So the so-called Wonga Coup, had it succeeded, might even have improved the lives of...imagine that it could have made them worse. Let the failed Wonga Coup stand firstly, then, as a lesson to future soldiers of fortune...
- The Wonga coup; guns, thugs, and a ruthless determination to create mayhem in...
- Magazine article from: Reference & Research Book News November 1, 2006 700+ words
9781586483715 The Wonga coup; guns, thugs, and a ruthless determination to create mayhem in an oil-rich corner of Africa. Roberts, Adam. PublicAffairs...
- The Wonga coup.(News)
- Newspaper article from: The Mercury (South Africa) November 12, 2009 700+ words
...plotted the failed coup were arrested and interrogated in African prisons, where conditions left much to be desired. The Wonga Coup was aimed at unseating the president of the Guinea. It failed in spectacular fashion and the ill-educated president of...
- Inside story of the 'wonga coup'; Mercenary Simon Mann has been pardoned in...
- Newspaper article from: The Mercury (South Africa) November 4, 2009 700+ words
The "wonga coup", the perfect plot, meticulously planned, audacious and hugely lucrative, the takeover, no less, of a small country with...
- Buchman eyes 'Wonga' script.(Peter Buchman, "The Wonga Coup" )(Brief article)
- Magazine article from: Daily Variety Zeitchik, Steven March 16, 2007 700+ words
Scribe Peter Buchman is in final negotiations to adapt "The Wonga Coup" for Miramax and Jason Blum's Blumhouse Prods. Project, based on a book by Economist writer Adam Roberts, centers on a failed...
