Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 14:38:10 GMT Server: NCSA/1.4.2 Content-type: text/html Last-modified: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 03:15:26 GMT Content-length: 2473
Patrick O'Brian has spent over 20 years writing a series of novels about the adventures of a Royal Navy captain and his ship's surgeon in the Napoleonic Wars. For a combination of adventure stories and effortless prose, they can't be beat. If you are interested, I recommend starting with the first volume in the series, Master and Commander.
Anchee Min's autobiographical work Red Azalea describes her youth in China during the Cultural Revolution. The story begins as a straightforward story of being sent to a collective farm, but then it takes enough plot twists to satisy Dickens. Min's style is very direct without much reflection on why things happened, but that directness gives the plot twists more impact and creates an urgent rhythm.
The journalist John McPhee displays a penchant for writing about geology and people's interactions with their physical environment. In The Control of Nature he writes about Icelanders trying to redirect lava flows with firehoses and bulldozers, Los Angelenos catching mudslides in large basins and the Army corps of engineers attempting to prevent the Mississippi river from creating a new channel to the sea. Coming into the Country offers three stories on Alaska. One describes a river trip through national park lands, one is about the search for a new state capital site, and the third describes a community deep in the Alaskan bush. La Place de la Concorde Suisse takes a look at the Swiss style of heavily armed neutrality. It has plenty of annecdotes about how various bridges are rigged with explosive charges, etc. but the best parts are about the young soldiers finding good places to eat and drink while they are supposed to be working. In The Curve of Binding Energy, McPhee interviews a scientist who began his career designing nuclear weapons at Los Alamos and after finding out how easy it is to build one, started to work on safeguards to prevent nuclear fuel from being used to make bombs. Last and least, Oranges decribes the citrus industry, circa 1966. The good stories are rather thinly spread through the book.