Reviews and Comments

I pretty much loved this from start to finish. I am a slow reader, but found myself frequently picking this book up whenever I had a spare ten minutes.

He also uses a trick, that John Irving uses, which really hooks me. At the end of several chapters, he gives a spoiler about the current topic, but then the next chapter is on a different topic. The spoiler just teases you enough to want to keep reading now to get closer to when the teaser is fully expunged.

His voice and style is the same as with pretty much all Bill Bryson books, if you love Bill Bryson, there is no good reason not to read this one. That said, if you aren't a fan this will likely be a long slog. If you've never read any Bill Bryson, perhaps start with a shorter one as a taster.

This was very readable, very easy and pleasant, almost cozy to read. It's a little tougher to say that I'll remember it, or see exactly what the point was. I understand that this was a serialised novel, and I could imagine reading it one chapter a day (for some 200 days) and that would be quite nice.

But reading it as a book novel, I struggle to see what the point is? It's almost like a soap opera in written form. That said I did like the character development, it just didn't seem to go anywhere with those developed characters.

Excellent thriller writing. For most of the first third I was gripped with the unfolding drama, and then once the culprit was relatively obvious the rest of the book is interesting as to how it will all end. It certainly kept me turning the pages.

A very good overview of the topic of the Soviet Union side of world war two, and the many contradictions therein. It's a little difficult to say more, and I don't know how well it can be judged for factual correctness as I'm not a historian. But nonetheless this was a useful book, and I, at least, enjoyed reading it.

This was a pretty enjoyable read. I'm generally a bit of a sucker for war related stories. This is basically the author's imagination of how Josef Mengele's time in South America went. It's pretty readable, but there isn't much there to takeaway. He was mostly in hiding, leading a pretty simple life. But that much we probably already guessed. I guess I was hoping for something a bit more surprising.

This was pleasant enough to read, but I was really hoping for more depth. There are 52 rules, each of which are just 2 small pages, about 3 paragraphs worth. My problem here is that for me, I knew pretty much everything in the book, with a few small (but interesting) exceptions. I suspect that's probably true of most people who would decide to read this book.

The humour in this is okay, and for the most part this is pretty easy reading. I feel though that a lot of the humour is rather forced, setting up a lot of straw men, i.e. describing things as a lot worse than they actually are in order to ridicule them. Overall I think if this had been half the length it would have included the best content and probably been a somewhat better read. This is similar to many comedy films that would have been better as a half-hour episode, since they just don't really have the content for a full 90+ minutes.