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Title: The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge ISBN: 0-7867-0207-9 Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub. Date: May, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.2 (15 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The novel leaves you wanting more!
Comment: Bainbridge takes the tragic 1912 South Pole journey of Robert Scott and his men, and tells the tale from each of the five perspectives. Her talent is that the voice of each man sounds distinct from the others, and the story slowly draws you in to its inevitable, tragic conclusion. It helps to know more about the actual journey; reading this novel, although fabulous, is like seeing a picture through a keyhole.
Rating: 4
Summary: What Antarctica must have felt like...
Comment: Bainbridge does a fine job dramatizing the deaths of the five doomed members of Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic Polar Expedition, in five separate chapters, each written in the voice of a different one of the five men. Bainbridge is obviously well-versed in the details of the true story, and the book hews closely to the facts of the case.
She's at her best in articulating the sort of self-absorbed England-forever attitude of the officers, but her depiction of ordinary seaman Edgar "Taff" Evans falls short; he speaks with almost the same Oxbridge vocabulary as his captain.
Despite this weaker one-fifth of the book, the book overall is quite appealing in the way it conveys a strong sense of the physical place, Antarctica. You can just imagine the sharp intake of frozen air into your lungs as you fall down a crevasse to the end of your harness, waiting for your companions to pull you back to safety.
Rating: 5
Summary: Bainbridge should win the Booker Prize
Comment: Her prose is economical and expressive to the point that other talented writers now strike me as using too many words. What's more, Bainbridge's imagination is stunning. Although I understood that I was reading a 'fictional' account of the failed Scott expedition, I kept finding myself thinking that I was there, witnessing what happened, peering over a shoulder as someone wrote in his journal...(!) She's that good. I'm a historian, and I find B's imagined re-creation of what happened on the Scott expedition (which is based on her expert command of the historical sources) completely convincing, and powerfully moving. What a genius!
Bravo, Bainbridge.
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Title: Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing ISBN: 078670621X Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub. Date: April, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard ISBN: 0786704373 Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub. Date: April, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Cherry : A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard by Sara Wheeler ISBN: 0375754547 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Every Man for Himself by Beryl Bainbridge ISBN: 0786704675 Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub. Date: November, 1997 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: The Great White South: Traveling With Robert F. Scott's Doomed South Pole Expedition by Lady Scott, Roland Huntford, Herbert George Ponting, Lady Scott ISBN: 0815411618 Publisher: Cooper Square Press Pub. Date: January, 2002 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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