“The Kingdom” by Clive Cussler
Posted: July 5, 2013 Filed under: From our bookshelf... | Tags: Adventure, Clive Cussler, Fiction Leave a comment
I have read most of Cussler’s books until the last couple of years when he seems to have written too many to keep pace with. My favourites are the Dirk Pitt stories.
This is a Fargo duo adventure as they attempt to visit Shangri-La in their efforts to trace a missing father and an investigator who has vanished while trying to find him. Always good background settings and some historical detail to go with the occasional gun fight. I must admit that I had forgotten where this one set off by the time I got to the end.
Jean
“Pandora in the Congo” by Albert Sanchez Pinol
Posted: June 14, 2013 Filed under: From our bookshelf... | Tags: Adventure, Albert Sanchez Pinol, Fiction Leave a comment
Shades of Rider Haggard flit through this unusual book, together with science fiction happening and two huge diamonds which are brought out of the jungle by one Marcus Garvey.
Our storyteller is Tommy Thomson who is a ghost writer. After reading this story I would not recommend anyone to try to earn money this way. There does not seem to be any way to get at the truth of the synopsis you are to write about.
Tommy eventually realises that he has been hired to finish stories done by previous ghost writers who have all met a strange end.
The Congo is as large as England, France and Spain put together. Imagine that covered with trees twenty to two hundred feet high and below the trees – nothing. Exactly!
This was to be part of a Trilogy written in Catalan in 2003.
Jean
Adventure
Posted: June 6, 2011 Filed under: Monthly reading selections | Tags: Adventure, Alistair MacLean, Clive Cussler, Fiction, H.E. Bates Leave a comment
This month’s review is actually a selection set over the years from 1950 to 210, sixty years of very different styles of writing.
It is many years since I read a book by H.E. Bates, so many that I cannot remember what it was titled, but I was impressed by his words. We start with “The Scarlet Sword” set in Kashmir during the time of the partition of India. A small community shelter in the Catholic mission which is in the path of warring tribesmen. “An inspiring study of fear and heroism.”
Moving on to the 1970s, Alistair MacLean had become one of the top 10 bestselling authors in the world. My choice is “Circus”, a trapeze artist, clairvoyant, is recruited by the CIA to break into an impregnable fortress. A very well told, twisting story which retains the suspense right to the end but this can only be expected from a master storyteller.
Much to my surprise my next book was first published in the USA in 1973 as “The Mediterranean Caper” and came to Great Britain under the title “Mayday”. The first of the Clive Cussler series and I must admit that had I read this before all his other books I might not have continued reading them as his main character Dirk Pitt comes over’s as a very different man in most of the later books. A fascinating series, my latest read being “Medusa” from the Numa Files series.
Jean
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