Written from a child's perspective, it contains all of the confusion of a boy growing up in a household where revolution is happening yet must be hidden.
I really appreciated the amoral character of the narrator. Although it makes it hard to like him, it is the behavior of a confused, distressed boy that makes him more believable than some idealized narrator.
I wonder- as I always do when I read similar books- how I would act in a revolutionary setting. So much easier to attempt to ride it out- at least your family might not get torn apart as this one did. But how much nobler to fight for the truth and democracy.
Depressing, brutal, and unflinching, I enjoyed this book.

Doctor Zhivago was barred from publication in the author's own country -- the Soviet Union. Embracing the first half of the century, the opening chapters portray the pre-revolutionary atmosphere of unrest in which Zhivago's intellectual and moral ideals take root. After his service in the army he takes his family to the Urals and there is kidnapped by partisan forces to Siberia where he leads an inhuman existence. After a successful escape he has a brief reunion with his true love and companion and travels to Moscow only to find his family in exile. Rather than capitulate to the obligatory Weltanschaung he waives the academic life for manual labour and finally dies in a tram. The picture of Soviet society -- the price of Revolution- is framed by the philosophical considerations of the problems of good and evil, historical necessity vs. individual freedom, spiritual values as imminent rather than transcendant.


I loved this book (AND the movie). I had some trouble remembering all the Russian variations on personal names and had to keep a "cheat sheet" in order to remember who is who so that the book didn't become confusing for me and so I didn't spend all my reading time figuring out names.

This book and its huge cast of characters travel through England, France, and the Americas in search of adventure, wealth, and an idealistic society. My favorite character was Polly Lucking, the former prostitute who finds it all in a man's world.
I really enjoyed the adventure in this story- it was a very fun read. From a literary perspective, I think there were too many characters- it could have been much tighter (Lord Ashby? Priscilla Christmas?) The ending was very strange and didn't seem to much fit with the happy-go-lucky nature of the rest of the wild-west adventure. I would have preferred it to end differently, but overall it was enjoyable.

This biography, from Marie Antoinette's birth, childhood, how she became queen of France and her character, has lots of details about all aspects of her life. However, I felt it was a bit skimpy on details about what drove the French revolution, and what fueled the people's hatred of her.
I was very disappointed to find out that she never actually said, "Let them eat cake." It's too good of a line to not actually be true.

The end was very sad, and I felt the way I do at the end of every sad biography. How inevitable was it? Could things have ended differently? With reason and hindsight, it seems so sad and wasteful.

I wish I knew more about the French Revolution. I know all of the trite stories from Les Miserables, but not many facts.

Ayn Rand's We The Living is a novel set in Russia right after the revolution and explores the lifes and times of primarily three individuals: Kira, the female who wants to be an engineer and is passionately in love with Leo, the son of former Army General and the immistakable Andrei, who has risen from streets to become a formidable communist. To complete the cast is Victor, Kira's cousin, who does the needful to shed his bourgeois past and rise through the ranks; Pyerov and Sonia, who in their own way use communism to become richer and powerful, and other members of Kira's family. The novel dwells on how revolution alters not only their daily lifes, morals, ambitions but also reveals their base and basic human character. It is a tale of falsified hopes, broken dreams, corruption, love, and of the struggle of someone to survive a political system that is of utmost dislike to him/her.

Perhaps as the first book to come out of communist Russia, We The Living has gained more respect than it merits on basis of just literary qualities. Like all her heroes and heroines, Rand's prime suspects here are three idealists who seek to justify their different means for their selfish ends. The love triangle between Andrei, Leo and Kira is stifling reminder of how some people try to lead a dual life, hoping they can let two people be happily in love with them. While the novel is a great treatise on how and why communist Russia squandered the dreams of early revolutionaries, Kira fails to impress. Her convictions are full of contradictions, as are her means and methods of achieving them. If I really want someone to read about communist Russia, I'd ask them to pick Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. If Ayn Rand's objectivism or invidualism is the ideal, stop after reading Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

What an interesting book about something I knew nothing about. The British offered slaves freedom and land if they defected to the British army during the American revolution. Blacks played a large role in the war. When the British lost, they began relocating former slaves to Canada.
Unluckily, the British weren't that much better to them than the Americans. Promises were broken over and over again, the land owed to them wasn't given, and they were essentially slaves all over again. Racism was still the norm in Canada and England itself.
This story involves biographies of several individuals, such as Granville Sharp, who fought for freedom for the blacks. The second part of the book was about the colony in Sierra Leone, which was designed to be an English/black free city in Africa.
Despite being a long, nonfiction book, it was never boring and I stayed very interested for the entire book. I would have been interested in learning more about what happened to the colony in Sierra Leone.

I had a very hard time staying interested in most of this book. It went into excruciating detail about every single aspect of Franklin's negotiations in France- where he lived, his friends, his writing, his negotiating, his pleasures, what everyone in France and the United States thought about it. There were too many French names, and the same American names for different people, for me to keep track of, especially in the audio version. On top of poor sentence and paragraph construction, it was almost too much for me to listen to. It could have used much better editing. A thinner volume would have been much more interesting.
I wish I had learned more from this book. The only part I really listened to was the very end, about Franklin's return to America and how he got nothing, especially when compared to other diplomats and other Founding Fathers. He and his family got nothing, which made me angry and a bit ashamed of my new country.