Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice. As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan. I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet. After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview . So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not. Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot. These new books were spare, polished, poetic. The
Ah, too funny. I just posted about StratBlog and the posts on Thucydides so far. As I told my wife, this is the type of course I wish I had taken in college--which, of course, I would have blown off just like all the ones I did take.
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ReplyDeleteWe homeschool and my son is daily asking me questions about the whys and wherefores of the Peloponnesian wars, and I must admit to the fact that it has been a little while since I've done anything other than read your recent posts. So it appears I'm due a re-immersion in Thucydides. And then perhaps to Xenophon--the Landmark Hellenika. (I can't imagine that these are best-sellers, I'm surprised they are being produced. But I'm so grateful.)
shalom,
Steven
I'm planning on reading the Landmark Hellenkika in a few months--my wife got that for me as a present the previous Christmas but I thought I better read Thucydides first. The Landmark series is wonderful, missteps and all.
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