Scottish Books

Knights of the Black and White (A Templar Novel)

Jack Whyte

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 37 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Struggles 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Part of me thinks this should get 2 stars but I found the subject matter compelling. The book has some serious flaws, however. White struggles throughout to find a story. The narrative is disjointed and seems meandering at times with little relevance. The characters are somewhat flat and others are gratuitous. (Really, what was the point of the nymphomaniac princess?).

Anyway, KotWaB is not the best-written novel but at least it moves quickly (especially when you skim through the many pointless sections). The conclusion was somewhat of a let-down (which is not remedied in the second book of the series; it jumps way ahead into the future). The second book is a little bit better (although the same problems exist). Skip this book and read "Standard of Honor"; you won't miss anything important.

Not recommended.

Editorial Review:

A brother of the Order-a medieval secret society uniting noble families in a sacred bond-Sir Hugh de Payens has emerged from the First Crusade a broken man seeking to dedicate his life to God. But the Order has other plans for him: to uncover a deadly secret that could shatter the very might of the Church itself.

The Complete Fairy Tales (Penguin Classics)

George Macdonald, U. C. Knoepflmacher

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

An authoritative edition of the shorter fairy tales of George MacDonald, "one of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth century" (W. H. Auden)

George MacDonald occupied a major position in the intellectual life of his Victorian contemporaries, and his dazzling fairy tales earned him the admiration of such twentieth-century writers as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and W. H. Auden. Employing paradox, play, and nonsense, like Lewis Carroll's Alice books, MacDonald's fairy tales offer an elusive yet meaningful alternative order to the dubious certitudes of everyday life.

The Complete Fairy Tales brings together all eleven of George MacDonald's shorter fairy tales, including "The Light Princess" and "The Golden Key," as well as his essay "The Fantastic Imagination." The subjects are those of traditional fantasy: fairies good and wicked, children embarking on elaborate quests, journeys into unsettling dreamworlds, life-risking labors undertaken. Though they allude to familiar tales such as "Sleeping Beauty" and "Jack the Giant-Killer," MacDonald's stories are profoundly experimental and subversive. By questioning the concept that a childhood associated with purity, innocence, and fairy-tale "wonder" ought to be segregated from adult skepticism and disbelief, they invite adult readers to adopt the same elasticity and openmindedness that come so naturally to a child.

"I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master . . . The quality that had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live." --C. S. Lewis

Garnethill

Denise Mina

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Total reviews: 36 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Garnethill (the name of a bleak Glasgow suburb) won the John Creasey Memorial Award for Best First Crime Novel--the British equivalent of the Edgar. It's a book that crackles with mordant Scottish wit and throbs with the pain of badly treated mental illness, managing to be both truly frightening and immensely exhilarating at the same time.

Maureen O'Donnell, surely one of the most unlikely crime solvers in recent history, comes from a family so seriously dysfunctional that it deserves a television series of its own. Her mother is an overly dramatic alcoholic who "could scene-steal from an eclipse"; her brother Liam is a bumbling drug dealer; and the black sheep of the family is a sister who went to London and became a Thatcherite. The troubled but gutsy Maureen decides to dump her boyfriend, Douglas--an abusive (and married) psychologist she met while a patient at a sex-abuse clinic. After a night of drinking with a friend who's a social worker, Maureen wakes up to find that Douglas has been tied to a kitchen chair in her flat with his throat slashed. As someone with both a motive and a history of mental illness, Maureen is the most likely suspect--until a second, similar murder occurs that links the crimes to a local psychiatric hospital. Denise Mina, who has a background in health care, law, and criminology, is definitely a writer to watch. --Dick Adler

Kieron Smith, boy

James Kelman

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Editorial Review:

I had cousins at sea. One was in the Cadets. I was wanting to join. My maw did not want me to but my da said I could if I wanted, it was a good life and ye saved yer money, except if ye were daft and done silly things. He said it to me. I would just have to grow up first.

James Kelman’s triumph in Kieron Smith, boy is to bring us completely inside the head of a child and remind us what strange and beautiful things happen in there.

Here is the story of a boyhood in a large industrial city during a time of great social change. Kieron grows from age five to early adolescence amid the general trauma of everyday life—the death of a beloved grandparent, the move to a new home. A whole world is brilliantly realized: sectarian football matches; ferryboats on the river; the unfairness of being a younger brother; climbing drainpipes, trees, and roofs; dogs, cats, sex, and ghosts.

This is a powerful, often hilarious, startlingly direct evocation of childhood.

Flesh House (Logan McRae)

Stuart MacBride

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Killers have terrorized Aberdeen in the past—Detective Sergeant Logan McRae has the scars to prove it—but when body parts show up in a cargo container at the harbor they kick off Scotland’s largest manhunt in twenty years. Last time they were searching for Kenneth Wiseman, a brutal killer who terrified the country, who was eventually caught only to be acquitted eleven years later on a technicality. Now he’s gone missing, people are dying, and the police are certain he’s at work again.

As the violence escalates, DS McRae is forced to work with the senior officers assigned to the original case who have returned to Aberdeen to finish what they started. With decades of secrets and lies coming to light, the only thing that’s certain is that the city will never be the same again.

Once again, award–winning author Stuart MacBride fuses his signature dry wit with a dark and twisting plot to tell his most searing and accomplished story yet.

Ovid (Felony & Mayhem Mysteries) (Marcus Corvinus Mysteries)

David Wishart

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

First Book in the Series 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

David Wishart was born in Arbroath, Scotland. He studied Classics - Latin and Greek - at Edinburgh University and after graduation taught for four years in a secondary school. He then retrained as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language and worked abroad for eleven years, in Kuwait, Greece and Saudi Arabia. He returned to Scotland in 1990 and now lives with his family in Carnoustie, mixing writing with teaching EFL and study skills at Dundee University.

This is the first in the series of novel by the author featuring Marcus Corvinus, an amateur sleuth and connoisseur of fine wines. The books take a similar theme to the Falco novels of Lindsey Davis, but Falco and Corvinus are from different periods of Roman history. The time period and class of Wishart's sleuth are different. Falco lives in Flavian Rome and has just worked his way into the Equestrian class, while Corvinus is a patrician in the age of Tiberius. However both Corvinus and Falco have a wife behind them, who it could be said, is the making of them.

The books are popular and for anyone who likes Lindsey Davis or Steven Saylor are a must. This one as the title suggest is about Ovid and the mystery behind what he actually did to get himself exiled from Rome.

Editorial Review:

Nobleman by birth, loutish party boy by temperment, Marcus Corvinus is a citizen of ancient Rome, but he would be as much at home in a champagne-stained tux as he is in a toga. He'd like to shed that toga for the beautiful Lady Perilla, but in return for her favor she demands that Corvinus help retrieve her stepfather's ashes for burial in Rome. The task proves more difficult than expected: Perilla's stepfather was the famous poet Ovid, exiled years earlier and still loathsome to the Emperor Tiberius. But Corvinus' arrogance - and letch for Perilla - keep him on course, even when the Emperor's thugs try a little up-close-and-personal persuasion. Author David Wishart, a classical scholar, knows a great deal about both ancient Rome and gilded youth. You may not approve of Corvinus, but you'll have a tough time resisting his charm.

Self-Help (Oxford World's Classics)

Samuel Smiles

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Victorian Britain's Statement on the Virtues of Hard Work 4 out of 5 stars.
13 of 14 people found this review helpful.

The following review is based on the Oxford World's Classics edition, edited bby Peter W. Sinnema.

'Self-Help' was published in 1859 in England, and became the instant bestseller, with 20,000 copied sold within the year after publication, making Samuel Smiles a household name. It is hard to categorize this book into any genre, but basically 'Self-Help' is a statement on the virtues of hard working, or in Smiles's favorite word, 'perseverance,' amply illustrated by many examples of biographical records collected by Smiles.

The chapter names would show the contents -- 'Self-Help: National and Individual'; 'Leaders of Industry: Inventors and Producers'; 'Three Great Potters'; 'Application and Perseverance'; 'Helps and Opportunities'; 'Workers in Art'; 'Industry and the Peerage'; 'Energy and Courage'; 'Men on Business'; 'Money: It's Use and Abuse'; 'Self-Culture: Facilities and Difficulties'; 'Example: Models'; 'Character: The True Gentleman.'

Each chapter tells you the examples of hard work and its eventual triumph, and with many biographical episodes, Smiles argues the importance of being earnest, no matter where the supposed readers belong to the social ladder of England. For example, in the Chapter 'Three Great Potters' you can see the life of three potters -- Palissy, Bottgher, and Wedgwood -- and how they. in spite of the numerous obstacles rushing to them, succeeded in their art, with which their names were recorded in the history.

Like this, Smiles' book has a pattern -- it states its point first, championing the virtue of hard work, then he supports his statement with mini-biographies about many people, which include that of mechanics, philanthropists, scientist, musicians, soldiers, politicians, merchants, and many others. But as this is written in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, many pages are devoted to the inventors of new machines, or their privation, suffering, and final victory.

Often his styles are preachy, and Smiles didn't include many remarkable women who should have been included (if he does, those women's roles are often as men's 'help-mates'), and it has been pointed out since the publication that the cases Smiles cites as examples are all successful ones. But as it was written long time ago, we should take the book as it is now.

Oxford editon included concise introduction by Peter W. Sinnema, and helpful notes and glossary of the names the book deals with.

This is not a so-called 'how-to' book (if you want to read that way, of course you can), but a good proof as to how Victorian working class and lower-middle class thought about being 'viruous' and 'respectable.' If you want to see the glimpse of Victorian ideas among ordinary people, and how such ideas greatly influenced the writers like Dickens who created Mr. Bounderby in 'Hard Times,' you should read this book.

Editorial Review:

A bestseller immediately after its publication in 1859, Self-Help propelled its author to fame and rapidly became one of Victorian Britain's most important statements on the allied virtues of hard work, thrift, and perseverance. Interpreted by some as a paean to personal avarice, Smiles's most celebrated book is in fact a practical and engaging tribute to the working- and lower-middle classes, in whom he identified the capacity for self-improvement and for whom he tirelessly advocated the right of social advancement. Part practical guide, part proverbial testament, part secular hagiography, this literary hybrid turns biography into an inspirational medium that awakens the reader to their own potential and instills the desire to succeed. Smiles's book is the precursor of today's motivational and self-help literature, although its vision is significantly more cosmopolitan than that of most books in an ever-expanding genre.

The Gifts of the Child Christ: And Other Stories and Fairy Tales

George MacDonald, Glenn Edward Sadler

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A very apt intro 5 out of 5 stars.
52 of 52 people found this review helpful.

My wife gave me this book for Christmas; she new I liked C.S. Lewis and that he counted Geo MacD as his mentor. I can heartily recommend this volume to anyone. The variety of style is what struck me the most: some of these I will read aloud to my children, some made me laugh out loud, and others left me scratching my head as to what the author was alluding to. Geo MacD has great insight into human nature, revealing our innermost thoughts so we can see we are not so different from the next guy. If you have heard of the author but aren't quite sure you would like him, try this one --- you'll know instantly!

Great shorter tales by one of the best 19th Century fantasists 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful.

George MacDonald was one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, 19th Century fantasist, and a key influence on C. S. Lewis. He was a Unitarian minister, and much of his fiction was essentially religious. I am particularly fond of his children's novels, At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, and The Princess and Curdie. He also wrote adult novels, most importantly Phantastes and Lilith.

He also wrote a lot of shorter fiction. Much of the best is collected in The Gifts of the Child Christ and Other Stories, selected by Glenn Edward Sadler. Two of the very best are "The Light Princess", a very funny story about a princess with no gravity, either of spirit or physically; and "The Golden Key", a lovely symbolic story about a boy and a girl and their long journey together. Other highlights are "The Wise Woman, or The Lost Princess", a long story (35,000 words or so) about a spoiled princess and a spoiled shepherd's child and the efforts of an old wise woman to reform them; the title story, about how the daughter of a too serious man and his neglected young wife brings them together after their younger child is stillborn; "The Carasoyn" (or "The Fairy Fleet"), about a young man and his less than enjoyable involvement with a group of fairies and their queen; "The History of Photogen and Nycteris" (or "The Day Boy and the Night Girl"), about two babies kidnapped by an evil fairy, the boy brought up only in daylight, the girl only in darkness; and "The Cruel Painter" is a fine story about a painter who insisted on distorting his scenes to bring out the worst in their subjects, and the young man who falls in love with his daughter and comes to work as his apprentice.

There are quite a few more stories, most quite interesting, roughly evenly divided between fairy tales or fantasies and contemporary tales. Only very rarely does MacDonald moralize to the detriment of his stories, though his stories do quite often make moral points. (And quite explicitly Christian points.) Sadler has also selected quite a few period illustrations, many by Arthur Hughes, many from the original publications of the stories.

Editorial Review:

This new one-volume edition of The Gifts of he Child Christ gathers all the best shorter fairy tales and stories that George Macdonald wrote. Also included are the illustrations of MacDonald's stories by Arthur Hughes and others.

Missy: A Novel

Chris Hannan

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Missy is laudanum, or liquid opium. Missy is Dol McQueen, a nineteen-year-old “flash-girl” traveling the arduous wagon trail from San Francisco to the boomtowns of the Sierra Nevada. Her purpose: to fleece the silver miners and to have a marvelous time.

Permanently gonged on missy, Dol and her entrepreneurial instincts wake up only when she comes into possession of a rum crate full of pure opium. But the crate has several owners, each more brutal than the last. Soon, instead of selling the boodle and opening her own establishment, Dol is fleeing across the salt flats and wastelands of the monumental American Southwest, where Civil War renegades, Native American mule thieves, and gangs of feral kids make hanging on to life a job for both hands.

Chris Hannan has mixed the irresistible Mark Twain of Roughing It with Annie Proulx’s brilliantly macabre wordplay, and the result is a historical novel of startling originality, in which every detail rings true. Dol McQueen is the most engaging antiheroine since Becky Sharp, and she makes Missy a debut of terrific energy, freshness, and delight.

The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs: A Novel

Irvine Welsh

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Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"A family saga, a revenge fantasy, a Twilight Zone-esque parable, and, most importantly, a very fun read."—Entertainment Weekly

This story of two men locked in a war of wills that threatens their very existence is vintage Irvine Welsh. Troubled restaurant inspector Danny Skinner is on a quest to find the mysterious father his mother will not identify. Unraveling this hidden information is the key to understanding the crippling compulsions that threaten to wreck his young life. His ensuing journey takes him from the festival city of Edinburgh to the foodie city of San Francisco. But the hard-drinking, womanizing Skinner has a strange nemesis in the form of mild-mannered fellow inspector Brian Kibby. It is Skinner's unfathomable, obsessive hatred of Kibby that takes over everything, threatening to destroy not only Skinner and his mission but also those he loves most dearly. When Kibby contracts a horrific, undiagnosable illness, Skinner understands that his destiny is inextricably bound to that of his hated rival, and he is faced with a terrible dilemma. Irvine Welsh's work is a transgressive parable about the great obsessions of our time: food, sex, and celebrity.