Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

As a boy, I read “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque, the First World War seen from the German perspective and “Goodbye to all that”, the autobiography of the poet Robert Graves, who fought through the horrors of the Great War. Neither of these, however, compares with the intense immediacy of “Birdsong” by a man for whom the First World War is as much distant history as it is for me. Perhaps, on this account, he is able to write in graphic, vivid detail of the pre-war love experience of Stephen Wraysford, a young industrialist on secondment in Amiens, and then of his descent into the inferno which was the Somme and later Passchendaele. Some of the scenes describing the perilous work of the tunnellers under enemy lines came as close as what Dante, Shakespeare or Milton might have imagined Hell itself to be.

If you like history and love humanity, you must read this book.

This review is by Mr Gray, Principal at SMC.

Copies of this book are available in the SMC Library.

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson

This was the best book I read in 2011. Eminently readable it tells the story of a remarkable man, adopted at birth, rebellious at every stage of his childhood and youth, caught up in the hippy revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, enchanted by the spiritual values of Zen Buddhism which influenced products like the iPod, iPad and Apple Mac in his insistence on their perfect cornerless shapes and simplicity. Steve Jobs was irrational, brutal, abusive and a genius, a man who believed at the junction of the sciences and arts lays designers whose job it was to translate the most complex, scientific and technological concepts into easy-to-use, beautiful products available to the public. Thanks to him we hve everything from instant booksto instant music. Read this book, you won't be disappointed. This man changed the way we live.

This review is by Mr Gray, Principal at SMC.

Copies of this book are available in the SMC Library.

SMC Book Festival 2012

ESM BOOK FESTIVAL Programme 2012

Book Review of Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

I recommend this book which simply, delicately and painfully tells the story of the consequences if a man's involvement in a freak accident in which a crashed, hot air balloon blows away with a child inside. The book combines the tensions of an eerily sinister thriller with the paranoia of a man who falls prey to the obsessions of a religious maniac who confuses God's love with his own fantasies. In parallel there are two genuinely durable love stories, that of the narrator's relationship with his partner, and that of the widow and her heroic husband who dies in the ballooning accident. This book asks questions about sanity, conscience and moral responsibility.

This review is by Mr Gray,
Principal at SMC

If you would like to borrow this book we have some copies in the library.