The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War (book review)

A new book review from The Movie Snob.

The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, by Andrew Roberts (2011).  Is it possible to do more than skim the surface of World War II in a single reasonably sized volume?  Probably not.  But this one has a very readable style and seems to hit the highlights.  My enjoyment was diminished, however, when I looked at some reviews on Goodreads and saw some people calling Roberts out on some factual errors.  And then I saw some reviews criticizing the book for focusing much more heavily on the European theater than on the Asian/Pacific theater.  And I got kind of frustrated that the maps were all gathered at the front of the book and then weren’t even referenced in the text wherever they would have been useful.  So I can’t go more than three out of five stars for this one.

The Interestings (book review)

A new book review from The Movie Court.

The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer (2013).  I enjoyed this novel about a group of teenagers who become friends at an artsy summer camp in the early 1970s and mostly manage to stay friends as they grow up and experience adulthood.  The central character is Julie Jacobson, an awkward girl from an undistinguished background who is nevertheless adopted by a gang of cool kids.  Rechristened “Jules,” our protagonist is intoxicated by her new friends and spends most of the rest of the book yearning to recapture those adolescent summers—and being a little envious of the seemingly awesome lives two of her friends make for themselves afterwards.  Having recently been a fortysomething myself, I was perhaps naturally inclined to warm to the book’s themes of growing up and dealing with the pressures of adulthood, family, responsibility, loss, and mortality.