The bad things that happen are rooted in a sort of domestic banality set against gorgeously artistic backgrounds. A crucial contribution to the horror-story genre … her interest [is] in unexpiated guilt and a harking back to gothic or religious themes … the wall between supernatural apparitions and fictions of the human imagination is a thin one.

Sir Max Hastings is an author, journalist and broadcaster whose work has appeared in every British national newspaper. The central figures—JFK in the White House and Khrushchev in the Kremlin—are vividly revealed under stress. Robert McNamara had a leading role which is all the more striking given his perceived later failure during the Vietnam War.As Damaris’s and Chirli’s lives take increasingly tragic turns, their restless natures feel increasingly broadly symbolic of the difficulty of domesticating ourselves and others, even when it serves our best interests. His book of poetry is buried with him in a shallow grave, and he leaves behind only an inscription carved into the rim of the Fontebranda in honor of the aristocratic Signora Piccolomini who he loved. in " The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly " Publishing This Week" newsletter.

Fidel Castro’s seizure of power in Cuba in early 1959 made him popular in America for several months until he seized all American businesses and resorted to violence to maintain his position. We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. Fourth, in 2022, we have worldwide data and video communications of almost unlimited capacity and immediacy. Throughout, Kennedy is painted as balanced, even-handed and intelligent although he did make mistakes. We can only be thankful that, in spite of his recklessness, Khrushchev was wise enough not to turn over control of nuclear weapons to Castro.Frederick Cook, a young, shameless huckster who had accompanied Robert Peary as a surgeon and ethnologist on an expedition to northern Greenland. Take, for example, just one moment from among the many during the 13-day crisis that could have led to the inconceivable. As the action moves back and forth from Moscow to Washington, DC, to Havana, Hastings seeks to explain, as much as to describe, the attitudes and conduct of the Soviets, Cubans, and Americans, and to recreate the tension and heightened fears of countless innocent bystanders whose lives hung in the balance.

Although the sequence of events is now in the public domain, Hastings manages to convey well the tension of the times as well as describing some close-run events which were not public knowledge for some time but could have triggered the escalation most people feared. A vivid and compelling exploration of family dynamics and the damage they can do, Abyss is a tale to fall into and learn from. The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. Abyss provides chastening lessons on how easily things can spiral out of control but also how catastrophe can be averted.Abyss, Pilar Quintana’s second novel to appear in English, is—like its predecessor The Bitch, also translated by Lisa Dillman—concerned with the fraught relationships between caregivers and their dependents. A novel about women condemned to unfulfilled lives that avoids oversimplification through the opacity of its protagonist and the lovable, almost naive tone, which nonetheless fills the narrator’s gaze with pain. The French title L'Oeuvre au noir refers to the first step ( nigredo) of the three steps the completion of which is required to achieve the Magnum opus in the discipline of alchemy, whose ultimate goal is to transmute lesser metals into gold or to create the Philosopher's stone.