My first memory of Schindler's List is watching it at a theatre in the Netherlands. I have always been fascinated with history and found this book to be less about Keneally and his process, then it was about Leopoldo Pfefferberg, the Schindlerjeuden who made it his life's mission to educate the ...
I have seen this movie countless times and loved it every time. This was the first time I sat down to read the book and I’m very glad I did. As expected, it included much more detail than could be pressed into the movie, even with as long as it is. While there were variances, characters that were...
Bettany's Book is classic Keneally - long, broad and impossible to categorize (there are books within the book). This novel shows the author of Schindler's Ark again addressing issues of compassion and suffering with great understanding and a compelling sense of period and place. Both rural Austr...
Great writing as thoughts were presented in various layers. McLeod is the main character, weak but socially aware, empathic and romantic. The Aboriginal dance group is a great mix of personalities from the born again Christian to the curse maker to the pragmatist. The Japanese-American beauty is ...
Keneally is a master of his craft. The book is compelling, the young protagonist priest very convincingly portrayed. He becomes involved in three particular lives, one is a young woman, wife of a soldier (it is set in WWII Australia) who is either a prisoner of the Germans or dead; the second is ...
I found this book to be something of a disappointment. No because of anything this book is, but because of what I thought it was going to be. This might (probably is) be a bit unfair, but it did colour my final impressions of the book so it's worth discussing what exactly this book is.This book i...
Keneally's magnificent story of a young officer in a penal colony during the founding days of Australia transports readers through layer after layer of life in Sydney Cove, Australia. Advertising in New York Review of Books and Village Voice Literary Supplement.
Keneally writes a novel which is all about the fate of intellectuals and artists in Iraq in the UN sanctions period. He then saddles himself with two very awkward conventions which do the book no favours at all. First, I guess if you're writing about a contemporary government, you cloak the count...
A moving story of heroism, filled with vivid characterizations, suspense, and a keen sense of mystery--Kenneally's most compelling work since his Booker Prize-winning Schindler's List. A woman who loses her husband's love and attention to his mistress and his political dealings, and her children ...
When the film SCHINDLER'S LIST came out in 1993, Elinor Brecher did a remarkable thing. It occurred to her that, given her location in Florida, she might be living very near a few of the Schindlerjuden (those who were saved by Oskar Schindler during the Holocaust) and she undertook to interview a...
Before picking up A River Town, I hadn’t read anything by Keneally, who also wrote Schildler’s List, but, wow, he can write. It was nearly impossible for me to read this book quickly: the characters and locations are so well drawn that anything less than a deliberate reading seems insulting.Kemps...
Thomas Keneally, of Irish extraction, was brought up in Australia and still lives in Sydney. His novels include The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Confederates, which first led him to study nineteenth century American history. Schindler's Ark was later turne
Having seen Thomas 'Fenian' Keneally interviewed on TV many years ago,after the publication of a novel about Irish politics, & hearing his chippy Australian tones denigrating Great Britain & all who sail under her colours(me included!), I have avoided reading his controversial work - until now. T...
In the waning of the Edwardian era, a group of gentlemen wait out a raging blizzard in the perpetual darkness of the Antartic winter, poised for a strike at the South Pole. But as the storm lifts, a new challenge faces Captain Sir Eugene Stewart: to discover which of his men has become a murderer.
Thomas Keneally's epic of the Civil War takes us into the lives of four remarkable characters in the embattled Virginia summer of 1862: a southern hospital matron who is also a Union spy, a British war journalist with access to both sides, and two foot soldiers under Stonewall Jackson.
When Grace married the genial and handsome Captain Leo Waterhouse in Australia in 1943, they were young, in love - and at war. Like many other young men and women, they were ready, willing and able to put the war effort first. They never seriously doubted that they would come through unscathed.Bu...
This national bestseller by the highly-acclaimed author of "Schindler's List" tells the deeply moving and spellbinding story of an alienated Australian journalist's soul-searching journey across a war-torn Africa.
Her face looked a little sere, somehow, despite her breeziness, making one aware of the odds against fruition. They spent their afternoon on a narrow beach well within the bay. Autumn had begun. They sat on the sand, facing into an amenable sun. There was no conversation t...
My dear Dick, John White tells me that our friend Harry Brewer is in great danger and needs a constant watch. A number of occasions throughout a given day, his body has to be turned to prevent the blood from pooling and the lungs from congesting. I would like to make use of the services of convic...
I saw him open it. It was fat with documents. ‘I went to Victor’s bunk,’ he said, ‘and took his bags from beneath it and so took possession of his personal effects and documents. He’s written what looks like six excellent articles on our winter work, absolutely suitable as far as I can tell for p...
He had grown a sandy mustache which he hadn’t had in the old days, when Paul used to bring him aboard the Vistula for reasons which were part of Kozinski Constructions’ secret history. His belly had got looser too, but he still had his enormous shoulders—a weight lifter from before the time of th...
He had a hard climb of it though, just before dawn, from the valley of Nacfa up to the high ridge the Eritrean trench line followed. The ground was in fact so steep that Moka kept on telling me to hand over my pack to him, though he avoided the same gesture toward Henry, and—frequently desperate ...
It seemed to him to justify the monsignor's low estimation of him that he had entrusted such an important document to a first-grade child. Darragh consoled himself during downfalls with a book of Monsignor Knox's witty essays, The Mass in Slow Motion, in the parlor. Now th...
for the first time in all this immensity. The sermon that first Sunday, when only a proportion of marines and male convicts had been landed, had been based on Psalm 116, verse 12: “What shall I render unto the Lord for all the benefits toward me?” It was a question for which some of the male conv...
She had begun working again, he said. She was not content with resting in Rouen. At the advice of a mentalist, she had done what all her friends had unsuccessfully urged her to—stopped writing to the casualty bureau. In talkative moments in the nurses’ mess, Leo took some minor enjoyment from Bri...
The Pawiak, a series of cellars converted into dim interrogation cells, had housed thousands of captured Polish partisans, Jews masquerading as Aryans, and similar perceived threats to the balance of civilization. There was once a tall structure on top of the cellars, a more conventional prison, ...
They had been the best days Cheong had had since he had been taken prisoner. They had given him a chance through willing labor to show the authorities that he was not at one with the sullen occupants of Compound C, and such a demonstration was important to him. For Cheong was a nationalist, a Kor...
Helped thus from the flank, Ramsey enjoyed a necessary dominance over his wife. Then autumn turned his park sere in its imported varieties and cast a strong frost for those stoic native trees. Autumn brought, too, a postcard from Los Angeles. It read, “I have considered for some time whether I sh...