Sightings: Reviews 2002–2006 Broderick, Damien
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts,
01/2012, Letnik:
23, Številka:
3 (86)
Book Review
Recenzirano
Professor of Humanities at Chicago's Roosevelt University, Wolfe has received the Pilgrim Award from the Science Fiction Research Association, the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the ...International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, and a World Fantasy Award for critical writing, largely for his extensive and valuable reviewing work. What's lost, of course, is any parsing of the works into thematic or other groupings, even of the development of a given author (although I expect that many readers skip back and forth through books like this, hunting in the index for the next volume in, say, Kim Stanley Robinson's Washington trilogy begun with Forty Signs of Rain). Since these are reports on books just released, they have to include detailed or at least thumbnail descriptions of setting, characters, and plot, and there is little opportunity to invoke the critic's and readers' shared familiarity with the text (although in the case of a trilogy, later volumes can be reviewed after a brief inaugural gesture at the previous stanzas or movements). Brian Stableford's "Fleury seems thoroughly nonplussed, as though surprised to find himself in a novel rather than an essay" (30) ; Greg Bear's Moving Mars "shares some aspects of the planetary adventure, the cosmological epic, and the information-theory romance" (65); "the fact is that SF is still largely a perimeter market, and in terms of sheer prudence one can hardly blame Atwood for not wanting to be caught in it after dark" (139); "the story takes on the flavor of Balkan magic realism, and with its implicit clash of cultures sounds almost like a minor episode from Ivo Andric's The Bridge on the Drina" (354).
Tatjana Aleksic, The Sacrificed Body: Balkan Community Building and the Fear of Freedom. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 2013. Pp. xii + 266. 16 illustrations. Paper $27.95.
In 1991 Yugoslavia ceased to exist and the Yugoslav wars erupted, giving way to ethno-religious conflicts involving genocide, ethnic cleansing, rape, internment camps, mass graves, and torture. The ...work ends with a general fear for the future of the world political economy and aggressive nationalist ideologies; the Serbian vampire will not be quieted and his arcane lust for blood is only dormant.
Art and Statecraft Merrill, Christopher
The Wilson Quarterly,
03/2008, Letnik:
32, Številka:
2
Book Review, Magazine Article
... World War II, which for political reasons marked the end of the diplomatic careers of Perse and Andric, is the starting point for A Levant Journal, Seferiss account of his days and nights in ...Egypt with the Greek government in exile and then as ambassador to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Britain. Translated by Roderick Beaton, who published an acclaimed biography of Seferis, these selections from Seferis's notebooks, from 1941-44 and 1953-56, offer a portrait not only of critical moments in places that continue to make headlines, but also of a singularly talented writer whose grasp of contemporary issues-the fallout from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, for example, or the consequences of Cypriot independence-was informed by his historical sensibility.
The material is organized into twelve themes: the myth of origins; the myth of the golden age: grandeur and decline; territorial and symbolic representations of the nation; national heroes; ...sacrifice; religious identities; social identities; mother tongue; exile; uniqueness and plurality; friends and enemies; and self-realization of the nation. The primary sources chosen for each theme are intended to highlight the ways in which a given national group has understood its history through the centuries, justified its existence within given boundaries, and attempted to build group cohesion.
