( Pop'nfresh Gender Roles: On the Black Hill, by Bruce Chatwin )

This book is an account of the day to day life of a group of British soldiers in the trenches of WWI, in the autumn of 1916. They have recently come back from the front, theoretically to rest and prepare for a return to the front later in the fall. They are moved from town to town, they deal with heavy rain, mud, lice, rats, occasional shortage of ( Read more... )

Although the title suggests a memoir of time spent in Africa, Impressions of Africa is nothing of the kind. It has nothing to do with any real place called "Africa." Instead, it is a fantasy novel, full of fantastic anecdotes, bizzarre events, and improbable coincidences piled one on another to the point of tedium. It begins with a strange pageant ( Read more... )

A World of Love describes the interactions of five people--Fred and Lilia Danby, married but largely estranged, their daughters Jane and Maud, and Antonia--who live, somewhat uneasily, at Montefort, a decaying manor in the Irish countryside. The house belongs to Antonia, who inherited it from her cousin, Guy, who was killed in World War I. He left ( Read more... )

Comagu, the central character in The Heart of Redness, returns to Johannesburg after living some decades in America. Frustrated by the bureaucracy and the politics that prevent him from obtaining work suited to his qualifications, he is on the point of returning to America when he is diverted by an alluring woman and, hoping to find her, goes ( Read more... )

As everyone knows, in recent decades there has been a dramatic shift in public attitudes toward gay people, starting roughly in the 1960's. There is now a considerable body of novels and stories with gay themes, and it is not considered shocking to offer a favorable picture of gay life. The situation was very different in the early 20th century. E ( Read more... )

Out of Africa, the first non-fiction book I've encountered on 1001 Booksis a first-person description of life on a coffee farm in East Africa, near Nairobi, in the years during and after. Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen) bought the farm with her husband, managed it after she and he separated, and was finally forced to sell it because of the collapse of ( Read more... )

The Magus tells the story of Nicholas Urfe, a young Englishman who ends his relationship with an Australian woman, Alison, to take a job teaching in an English school on a Greek Island. In that idyllic setting he meets Conchis, a rich, mysterious, somewhat sinister figure who, with the help of several accomplices, leads him through an increasingly ( Read more... )

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