Book reviews roundup: Catastrophe, Bleeding Edge and An Appetite for Wonder

What the critics thought of Catastrophe by Max Hastings, Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon and An Appetite for Wonder by Richard Dawkins"Hastings hates British complacency about her military past, he hates British chauvinism, he hates Britain's patronising attitudes towards her allies, he hates Britain's love of turning retreats – Corunna, Dunkirk, Mons – into moral victories, he hates her continuing penchant for 'gesture politics', and he is damned sure that he is going to leave no treasured national myth unexploded." David Crane in the Spectator was taken aback by Max Hastings's Catastrophe, which covers the run-up to and first few months of the first world war – a "huge, compelling, argumentative bully of a book". The Sunday Times's Dominic Sandbrook was effusive: "With the centenary of the war almost upon us, the next 12 months will see a deluge of First World War histories. But Hastings's book … will take a lot of beating … his book is at once moving, provocative and utterly engrossing". For Ben Macintyre in the Times, "Catastrophe is a frontal assault on what Hastings calls the 'poets' view' of the First World War, the widely accepted belief that this was a conflict of such spectacular horror and human cost that it was not worth fighting and winning … This is history-writing at its best, scholarly and fluent."Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon's eighth novel, is, Tim Martin argued in the Daily Telegraph, "...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Tags: The Guardian History Culture Fiction Thomas Pynchon Books Richard Dawkins Features Science and nature Source Type: news