Task 3
Read the following novel
reviews, Identify the reviewer, the topic and the social function of each
novel!
Review 1.
A BROTHERHOOD OF SPIES
Cold war secrets exposed
Book Page review by Edward Morris
Book Page Top Pick in Nonfiction, May
2018
The
Cold War between the U.S. and Russia was at its iciest from the early 1950s
until well into the 1960s. Neither side knew a great deal about the other’s
military capabilities and even less about any grand designs for world supremacy.
The information the two superpowers did possess came mostly from spies,
diplomats, gossip and news reports. Although securing reliable intelligence was
clearly in the Pentagon’s interest, its chief focus was on improving its
weaponry. However, the nascent Central Intelligence Agency was interested in
experimental aerial reconnaissance projects.
Into
this jurisdictional minefield entered four inordinately talented civilians who
took it upon themselves to build and test technology that might reveal what was
actually happening in Russia: Edwin Land, the inventor of the first Polaroid
camera and a genius in the field of optics; Kelly Johnson, an engineer who
zeroed in on designing lightweight, high-flying aircraft that could photograph
the Russian landscape while, ideally, evading radar detection; Richard Bissell,
a Connecticut blue blood the CIA assigned to oversee and facilitate the
hush-hush project; and Francis Gary Powers, one of the daredevil pilots
selected to test the new spy plane, which they called the U-2. Powers would
later be shot down over the Soviet Union in the U-2, sparking even more
saber-rattling.
Among
the more colorful characters traipsing through this wide-ranging narrative are
the bulldoggish General Curtis LeMay, J. Edgar Hoover, the influential and
socially well-connected columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop, the surprisingly
restrained and canny Nikita Khrushchev, John F. Kennedy and Ian Fleming, the
creator of James Bond, who regarded Powers as a coward and traitor because he
didn’t kill himself before being captured by the KGB.
A
story as well told as Monte Reel’s A Brotherhood of Spies is
an irresistible call to binge-reading.
https://bookpage.com/reviews/22569-monte-reel-brotherhood-spies#.Wus7-siFPIV
REVIEW 2
THE MAP OF SALT AND STARS
Two lives, a thousand years apart
Book Page review by Omar El Akkad
Among
the many things the violence of war obliterates, perhaps the most malicious is
history. Now in its seventh year, the civil war that has turned Syria into the
site of one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises has also corseted one of
the oldest societies on earth into a kind of perpetual infancy. Syria, it
sometimes seems, only began to exist seven years ago, as a place defined only
by its current calamity.
In
many ways, The Map of Salt and Stars is at once a testament to
the brutality of the current Syrian conflict and a reverent ode to ancient
Arabian history. Syrian-American writer Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar has crafted
an audacious debut, ambitious and sprawling in both time and space.
The
book follows the story of Nour, a Syrian-American girl living in New York. In
2011, after Nour loses her father to cancer, her mother decides to move the
family back to Homs to be close to their extended family. But Nour’s arrival
coincides with Syria’s slide into civil war. Amid grotesque violence, Nour is
made a refugee, a traveler through Syria’s neighboring lands.
Almost a thousand years earlier, another
girl’s story unfolds. Rawiya, seeking a better life for her mother, disguises
herself as a boy and joins a legendary cartographer on a quest to map the known
world.
The
two stories unfold side by side, split by time but joined by a common
geography. Because the modern part of Joukhadar’s narrative carries the urgency
of the present tense, but the ancient half reads like an old Arabian fairy
tale, the dual story structure is at first jarring. But soon the book finds its
pace, and the intertwining tales complement each other in ways a single
narrative could not. A swooping bird of prey that threatens to devour the
ancient story’s traveling companions finds its modern-day analogy in the form
of Syrian fighter planes dropping bombs on besieged cities.
There
is a heartfelt quality to the story, evident in the meticulous historical
research that must have gone into the creation of the ancient part of the
book. The Map of Salt and Stars presents an Arab world in full
possession of its immense historical and cultural biography, marred by its
modern tragedies but not exclusively defined by them.
https://bookpage.com/reviews/22549-jennifer-zeynab-joukhadar-map-salt-stars#.Wus9vMiFPIU
REVIEW 3
WARLIGHT
Growing up in the wreckage of war
BookPage review by G. Robert
Frazier
Learning
who you are and, perhaps more importantly, who you are meant to be isn’t easy.
Nathaniel Williams, the young hero of Michael Ondaatje’s latest novel, Warlight,
spends much of his adolescence and later years pondering this.
The
author of the Booker Prize-winning The English Patient, Ondaatje
confounds his 14-year-old protagonist from the outset when the boy’s parents
announce they are going away for a year and that he and his 15-year-old sister,
Rachel, will be left in the care of a strange acquaintance known as the Moth, a
man they are certain is a criminal. In 1945 England, at the end of World War
II, Nathaniel and Rachel must adjust to their newfound parental abandonment and
accept the Moth’s warning “that nothing was safe anymore.”
As
narrated through Nathaniel’s intimate firsthand perspective, the siblings test
their new guardian by rebelling at school. But instead of meeting a stern
lashing for their behavior, they are surprised by the Moth’s calm understanding
and protective demeanor. Equally surprising is the cast of unusual characters
associated with the Moth who wind up staying at their house, including Norman
Marshall, better known as the Pimlico Darter, a smuggler and racer of greyhound
dogs.
The
siblings drift further from each other as Nathaniel finds a surrogate father in
the Darter and Rachel is drawn closer to the Moth. Events cascade with the
surprising return of their mother, Rose. But this isn’t a cheerful reunion, as
her abandonment and silence about her secretive service in the war have a
profound effect on her children and leave more questions than answers—questions
that plague Nathaniel well into adulthood and long after his mother’s death.
Contemplative and mysterious, Warlight is
utterly engrossing.
Complete the following table based
on the review texts 1,2, and 3
The
Identification of the reviewer, the topic and the social function of each novel
|
Review 1
A Brotherhood
of Spies
|
Review 2
The Map of Salt And
Stars
|
Review 3
Warlight
|
|
|
Name of Reviewer
|
Edward Morris
|
Omar El Akkad
|
G. Robert Frazier
|
|
Topic
|
A thrilling dramatic narrative of the top-secret Cold War-era spy plane
operation that transformed the CIA and brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
|
The story of a contemporary girl's flight into exile from the Syrian
civil war is deepened by the parallel tale of a 12th-century girl.
|
A story tells us about 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister Rachel whose
parents having moved to Singapore near the end of World War I.
|
|
Social Function
|
to appreciate or to critic a novel.
|
to appreciate or to critic a novel.
|
to appreciate or to critic a novel.
|
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