Write a critical review of a novel/book that you’ve recently read, in about 150-200 words (Refer to the book review language resource provided). Date:
Name of the Reviewer:
Title:
Author:
Genre:
A Brief Synopsis: (Include setting, plot, and linguistic details) Recommendations (would you recommend this book? Who to? Why?)
Answers
Answer:
I read this book because my father kept telling me that I would enjoy it. Truthfully, l finally picked up so he would stop nagging me about it even though it is about sports and history- my two favorite things.
Boys in the Boat is the motivational story of Joe Rantz, his wife Joyce, and the other members of the 1936 Washington University rowing team that won gold at the Berlin Olympics. This story is partially the story of Joe's perseverance during the depression and also his rowing team's quest to make it to the Olympics and subsequent epilogue.
The story is definitely inspiring not just because the US team won gold in rowing in Berlin but because of Joe's story. Abandoned by his father and stepmother and forced to live alone from his early teens, Joe worked his way to college and lived at the university gym. Joining the rowing team as way to keep in shape, Joe still had to work between semesters and during the summer even taking part in the construction of the Cooley Dam, just so he would have enough money to pay for tuition. Although during the depression, he somehow cobbled together the $25 necessary each term to stay in school. This is definitely a far cry from today's pampered NCAA athletes.
Boys in the Boat is a story about perseverance and I enjoyed it immensely. The reason I give this highly regarded book a 4 instead of a 5 is because the writing is not the absolute best, usually referring to Joe and Joyce in third person. I recommend this often overlooked chapter in history to all who haven't read it yet.
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The New York Times reviews Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry:
Three-quarters of the way through Lisa Halliday’s debut novel, “Asymmetry,” a British foreign correspondent named Alistair is spending Christmas on a compound outside of Baghdad. His fellow revelers include cameramen, defense contractors, United Nations employees and aid workers. Someone’s mother has FedExed a HoneyBaked ham from Maine; people are smoking by the swimming pool. It is 2003, just days after Saddam Hussein’s capture, and though the mood is optimistic, Alistair is worrying aloud about the ethics of his chosen profession, wondering if reporting on violence doesn’t indirectly abet violence and questioning why he’d rather be in a combat zone than reading a picture book to his son. But every time he returns to London, he begins to “spin out.” He can’t go home. “You observe what people do with their freedom — what they don’t do — and it’s impossible not to judge them for it,” he says.
The line, embedded unceremoniously in the middle of a page-long paragraph, doubles, like so many others in “Asymmetry,” as literary criticism. Halliday’s novel is so strange and startlingly smart that its mere existence seems like commentary on the state of fiction. One finishes “Asymmetry” for the first or second (or like this reader, third) time and is left wondering what other writers are not doing with their freedom — and, like Alistair, judging them for it.
Despite its title, “Asymmetry” comprises two seemingly unrelated sections of equal length, appended by a slim and quietly shocking coda. Halliday’s prose is clean and lean, almost reportorial in the style of W. G. Sebald, and like the murmurings of a shy person at a cocktail party, often comic only in single clauses. It’s a first novel that reads like the work of an author who has published many books over many years.