Winter of the World – the century-long tale that keeps getting better

January 27, 2013 2 Comments

Winter of the World - Ken FollettFittingly, shortly after winter began, I decided to start reading Winter of the World, the second book in Ken Follett’s The Century Trilogy.

This tome is the follow up to Follett’s Fall of Giants which made my Top Five Books of 2011 and takes place during the events of The Second World War. The characters from the first novel have become secondary, and their children now have the spotlight as they deal with the uprising and reign of Hitler, Stalin, Franco and the Empire of Japan.

Compared to the first book, Follett continues his marvelous intertwining of real life historical events with fictional characters who are often present to give a unique perspective of Pearl Harbor, A-bomb testing, or war in Spain, Germany and Russa to name a few examples. Through his incredible knowledge and research, I ended up feeling like these people really existed in these times and played active roles in many aspects of the war.

It might have been that I knew what to expect, but this book was much easier to read, though with the amount of characters we have to follow it can get a bit confusing at times, especially since I hadn’t read the first in two years. Once I got around that, the characters all have a lot of depth to them, and I cared what happened in each of their stories, which is of course very important if you want to get invested in a book.

If you’re a fan of historical fiction you’ll want to pick up this series, just be prepared to be reading for quite a while if you’re a slow reader like me. I give Winter of the World a 4/5.

Filed under Book Reviews Tagged with , , , , ,

The King’s Speech: a stammering success

January 12, 2011 2 Comments

Public speaking: it’s something we’re all forced to do at some point in our lives, whether it be in a business pitch, in front of a classroom or a large assembly hall. Personally it’s not my favourite activity, and I remember a time where I used to get so nervous I thought my presentations were unintelligible garbage. With time and practice I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve grown to be a lot more comfortable with it.

Imagine now, if you’re public figure who doesn’t mind being in front of large crowds, but no matter what you do, you’re unable to get what’s on the sheet in front of you out of your mouth properly, because you have a speech impediment. That’s something King George VI had to deal with all his life.

In The King’s Speech, Colin Firth plays King George VI and it tells the story of his stammer as he was put at the head of the United Kingdom. Desperate to find an answer to their problems, his wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) finds an unorthodox speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). The King and Logue were of different personalities and had many issues, but eventually the two became partners in working around the issue.

The next time you’re in a presentation and you’re feeling nerves, just be grateful that you can actually speak, because you could be saddled with a much more debilitating issue like King George VI was.

The King’s Speech was an award winning movie in my books, and both Rush and Firth are deserving of accolades as well. I give the 5/5, but I was tempted to take off a half-point simply for the miscasting of Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill. I couldn’t help but seeing him as his character Peter Pettigrew from the Harry Potter movies.

Here’s the actual King’s Speech from George VI himself, for your listening pleasure. It’s amazing how Firth nailed it:

Filed under Movie Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Fall of Giants: A giant novel worth reading

January 10, 2011 2 Comments

Ken Follett’s fictional account of the events that lead up to-, the battles of-, and after effects of the First World War, felt like a historic retelling of one of the major cultural turning points of the modern era.

Fall of Giants is the first in a series of epic novels that, through fictional characters and representations of actual ones, takes the reader through 13 1/2 years of wars, revolutions and cultural movements. The characters span across the globe in five different families (American, German, Russian, English and Welsh). Each of the people introduced in the book cross paths at one point or another, whether it be an American diplomat coming to the aide of two Russian slum-raised teenagers, or Ethel the former housewife of Earl Fitzherbert of her village rising up in the political ranks and making an adversary of him in the process.

Follett tells these individual stories, and many others with great attention to detail and with much research to backup the historical happenings of the time. I’ve said many times in my reviews that I’m more attached to novels that have a strong set of characters. I like to know as much about their lives as I possibly can like how their emotions handle different situations or in this case their political views. The characters are all pretty much set in their ways, so in terms of development, it doesn’t occur in most cases, but I feel for them when they’re defeated, even in the case of Earl Fitzherbert.

Another completely different picture of the war was painted for me after reading this. Follett is a respected author who has done many different war-themed novels, so I’m going to go out on a limb and trust the research he did into Fall of Giants. I kind of guessed much of what I knew about the war was propaganda and that it wasn’t the entire picture. Follett takes the reader into the mindset of the average labourer in England or Russia and shows just how conditions were for them, and why things happened the way they did. He also shows how the powers of the time dealt with the events leading up to the war, and eventually those that ended it.

It took me a long time to get through this 985 page beast, but I really enjoyed it. If you haven’t picked it up already I highly recommend you do so. I give Fall of Giants a 4/5.

Filed under Book Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

%d bloggers like this: