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[[Category:New Reviews|Biography]]
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{{newreview
|author=John Freeman
|title=How to Read a Novelist: Conversations with Writers
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=As a book reviewer there are certain people whom I hold in high regard and one of these is John Freeman. Not yet forty he has an enviable record as an editor to some of the big names in literature and it seems that every book of note for a decade and a half has been greeted by his review. Don't be misled by the title ''How to Read a Novelist'' - this isn't a guide to literary criticism, but a collection of Freeman's interviews with eminent authors. There are fifty six in total, ranging from literary giants such as Toni Morrison, Ian McEwan, Gunter Grass and Kazuo Ishiguro through to popular crime fiction writers such as Donna Leon.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1472109376</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|title=Inside The Centre: The Life of J Robert Oppenheimer
|summary=The title of this book does of course carry a sense of irony, although we never quite know exactly how much. When a man of diminutive stature was born in rural Romania in the 1860s nobody was to know what would happen to his lineage – there was no clue then that he would father ten children, and seven of them would inherit his genetic dwarfism. But history has pieced together all that followed, including the careers those children had as a performance troupe, belting out showtunes to their own accompaniment, and acting in their own tragi-comic skits. And then having the limelight stolen from them by the Nazis, and a transportation to Auschwitz. And then being surprisingly saved, and given what passed as a cushty life, fed and together, but tortured at the hands of the camp doctor, avidly researching anything he thought might shed clues on what singled out his Aryan race's genetic destiny. I say the amount of irony is unknown because we are not told exactly how short these little characters are – but he, the doctor, would have known. As one of the more ominous sentences you'll read all year has it – 'Mengele had plans for them'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849544646</amazonuk>
}}
