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This book won the "Best of the Bookers" prize in 2007. In other words it was judged the best book to have ever won the Booker Prize in history. To be honest I found it really hard to get into. It's the kind of book I would definitely want to reread because I know there are things I have missed that I will get the next time around; like an intricate painting it's the kind of thing that needs looking at more than once for true appreciation.
The story documents the life of Saleem and more widely his family. It is told from his viewpoint and begins with his ancestry before passing onto his birth and finally his life. Saleem is born at midnight on the day Pakistan was formed and India became independent from Britain. His picture is put in the paper and he receives a letter from the Prime Minister as the first child born on this auspicious date. Later in his life he discovers several children born between 12 and 1 on this date who he seems to have a mysterious connection to.
The imagery in this book is absolutely amazing. Woven through a time of extraordinary upheaval in India and Pakistan; Saleem sets himself impossible goals throughout the book and blames his and other misfortunes solely on himself. While his character is sad in this way, other facets of him add humour to the book.
I don't really feel I'm doing this book justice. At the moment I'm going to say I don't quite understand it and it will have to wait for another read.
Virginia Woolf was asked to speak about women and fiction, these extended essays were the result. The writing in these essays is quite like her fiction: descriptive, perceptive and fair. Woolf argues that women in literature have been more than often portrayed by men. She compares these fictional women with real women living throughout time and illustrates how the fictional portrayal of them brings women to centre stage while the historical reality shows them largely ignored. She also shows that women were only shown in relation to men and never as themselves. As well as this, Woolf also shows that even when women were portrayed by women it was done within the expected role of a woman as fair and virtuous.
Another facet of the book shows the beginnings of women writing fiction. As Woolf stipulates at the beginning "a women must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Woolf looks at women authors including Jane Austen, George Eliot and Currer Bell and shows how their lives were limited by their gender. It can be seen from this that women will only be able to write fiction freely when they are free from financial and societal bounds.
This is a brilliant read and shows a side of Virginia Woolf that is not always clear in her fiction. It is a fairly easy read and makes a good argument about femininity and feminism in general.
This is an amazing read which documents a study of sixty women undertaken by the author and their experiences of and responses to sexual violence of varying kinds. Kelly sets out the idea of a spectrum of sexual violence ranging from harassment to domestic violence to rape to incest, she also stipulates that all of these forms are potentially harmful.
This study firstly sets out the different perspectives on sexual violence (it should be noted here that it only deals with acts committed against women, by men. Kelly shows historically how different offenses have been viewed and offers a range of perspectives which explain the victimisation of sexual violence. She then offers her own thoughts on the subject and introduces the concept of a spectrum of sexually motivated acts. It offers a critique of the existing research and suggests ideas for further development.
The study itself consisted of in-depth interviews with 60 women, 30 of whom had already made it clear they had survived incest, rape or domestic violence. The women were asked to identify what they thought fitted into a particular category and the results are both extremely telling and startling. This study is an amazing look at the prevalence of sexual violence and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the area.
This book is a highly useful resource of the place of women in the criminal justice system; a subject which has - until recently been largely ignored by criminologists. I read the second edition of the book, published in 1996. This text provides a plethora of information on firstly, how women are dealt with as offenders within the criminal justice system and secondly, looks at the theories surrounding how and why women get involved within the system and criticisms of these theories where possible.
The sequence of studies contained in this book are enlightening but there are definite gaps in the research up to this point which Heidensohn points out. As well as this, she illustrates the difficulties of compiling any research which can tell us anything specific about gender in relation to crime.
This is a decent read which offers a fresh perspective on the subject of criminology and offers up images of femininity as well as encouraging current research about males to assess the product of masculinity in relation to their research rather than viewing male crime as the norm. Most of all this book encourages us to look at crime and criminality through gender-tinted glasses to achieve a fuller understanding of it.
This amazing book is the latest by Barbara Kingsolver and was bought for me for Christmas. I loved two other books I have read by her: The Bean Trees and The Poisonwood Bible. This story told through only letters and diary entries is the story of Harrison Shepherd, a young half-Mexican, half-American boy who loves to write. The book follows him all the way through to his supposed death.
The book is populated with both true historical characters such as Diego Rivera, Lev Trotsky and Frida Kahlo as well as ones like Harrison himself who is entirely fictional. How Kingsolver manages to incorporate both true historical accounts and an interesting fictional character is beyond me but she does it incredibly well, especially with the historical clarity which serves as a setting for Harrison's life from before World War II in an American Military Academy to the intrusive American practice of McCarthyism where Harrison finds himself persecuted as a political subversive. This story could contain mirrors of the truth of some people during this period in history and shows the possible consequences both emotional and life-changing of the twentieth century. The writing is entrancing and believable and matures as the narrator does throughout the telling of the book.
I guess what I appreciated most about this book was its awesome literature, the way in which even throughout the letters the story was told beautifully. The historical characters were brought to life and my interest in all of them began/was renewed. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of Kingsolver or who is interested in this part of history. It is truly a classic.
This amazing (if not a little dated, it was published in 1996) book is an excellent review and challenge of the tendency of criminology to be gender blind. It undertakes critical reviews of different feminist attitudes to the subject of crime and criminology and shows still prevalent attitudes of the subject of criminal law and how it is influenced by the male-dominated school of thought of criminology.
The author of this book is a Reader in Laws in Adelaide with lots of experience writing around the topics of criminal law and feminism. This book begins with a critical look at the history of criminological thought with its beginnings in criminological positivism followed by radical and then realist criminologies late in the 20th century. These viewpoints are all assessed both from the stance which they took and the absence or near-absence of gender in their theories and areas of research (with the obvious exception of the growth of feminist criminology). The book offers a critique in particular of the positivist introduction of the scientific method which has seen an increase in recent times with many major criminological journals (at the time of this book) only accepting massive empirical studies from apparently bipartisan, almost all male researchers. Naffine also looks at the significance of males researching males as the norm without looking at the culture of masculinity within their own research rather than as a norm (and thus females as a weird aside).
Following this is a significant discussion of Foucalt's influence on the little feminist criminology there is taken from his research on power and knowledge and the growth of Derridean feminist views which look at the very limits of language and culturally "appropriate" labelling theory. An interesting look into studies of rape as a male-perpetrated female-victimised stereotype is also looked at in depth and critically evaluated. The book ends with an analysis of a quicker growing enterprise - that of female fictional crime novels about females who incorporate and rise above the female stereotype as either females in high positions, as investigators or females who turn the very concept of gender on its head.
I found this book extremely interesting and it heightened my interest in the subject. For anyone interested in feminism, criminology or any other social science I would highly recommend this book. Despite the fact it was published over a decade ago, I think many of its points are still highly relevant.
I first read this book when I was about 15. At the time I was enthralled and amazed by it and Joyce's ability to create characters that were readable if not likeable and to summarily use almost every form of prose imaginable successfully. A second read of the copy I bought second-hand was no disappointment, expect that I perhaps found it more of a marathon to get through. I began this book in 2009 and finished it in 2010 which seems fitting for what has been called one of the most difficult books to read in the English language.
The book centres around a man called Leopold Bloom. It almost becomes a necessity to like Mr. Bloom from the start or at least be interested in him. His life on this day is intertwined with Stephen Dedalus' who he comes into contact with and corresponds with throughout the book. The book follows him over a day walking around Dublin encountering life, death and many things in between. Joyce manages to symbolically fit in aspects of Ireland at the time the book is set as well as an intricate character. Joyce has a gift of translating thoughts, sounds and visions into words so intricate that they are capable of creating a vivid imagination in the reader's mind.
If you are looking for a book with a plot and suspense; don't read this book. Despite being to me and to many others such a dazzling display of literature; it is also about an unexciting day in the life of a fairly ordinary man and readers have to be able to grasp the ideas and to read between the lines to fully appreciate what is being put across. Almost the entire book is written in a stream-of-conciousness style making it often difficult to follow and towards the end of the book it becomes a play, a set of questions and answers and finally a continual stream of thought of Mr Bloom's wife, Molly.
It's impossible to fit my thoughts about this book into a short review. It is readable, far less so than his other books but definitely possible. It is intricate and often difficult to follow and I would not advise reading it while you are tired. The time it took me to read the book this time was by no means a waste, however. Joyce is amazing, this book is amazing and I would love to study it in more depth when I have a spare year or two.
