I am still just over half way through Fools Crow, but will manage to catch up I hope, so here I go with two very different nominations of not-so-short books:
-
Reluctant accomplice, by historian Konrad H. Jarausch, is centred around the letters that his father, a Nazi officer also named Konrad Jaraush, and also a historian (and theologian), wrote to his wife, another well educated member of the German intelligensia As reported in
a review in The Spectator,
Quote:
|
As a particularly high-minded secondary school teacher, his correspondence is unusually reflective about the war. While his patriotic support for German territorial expansion is palpable in the early letters, by 1941, when he is charged with feeding up to 20, 000 starving Russian prisoners of war every day, his certainty in the rectitude of the cause begins to waver. Like many others, Konrad senior was frustrated that doing his duty left little or no time for doing the things that interested him, namely reading works by the likes of Aristotle.
|
I mention this to make sure it qualifies as Literary work, and an extract from
a review in the English Historical Review seems to confirm the potential for literary value of this book.
My second nomination is entirely different, and is for a book by Andrew Graham-Dixons, an art critic who generally writes very well, entitled
Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. Caravaggio himself had a very tumultuous life, and I expect Graham-Dixons also to go over life in Rome in the 17th century in some detail - here is Goodreads blurb:
Quote:
|
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (29 September 1571–18 July 1610) lived probably the darkest and most dangerous life of any of the great painters. The worlds of Milan and Rome through which Caravaggio moved and which Andrew Graham-Dixon describes brilliantly in this book, are those of cardinals and prostitutes, prayer and violence. Graham-Dixon puts the murder of a pimp, Ranuccio Tomassoni, at the centre of his story. It occurred at the height of Caravaggio’s fame in Rome and probably brought about his flight through Malta and Sicily, which led to his death in suspicious circumstances off the coast of Naples. Graham-Dixon shows how Caravaggio’s paintings emerged from this extraordinarily wild and troubled life: his detailed readings of them explain their originality and Caravaggio’s mentality better than any of his predecessors
|
Both books are available from Kobo in the UK (and in India I presume
) - if you find them couponable, you may know there is a 90% multi use coupon floating around...