What the critics thought of The Games: A Global History of the Olympics by David Goldblatt; Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers; An Abbreviated Life by Ariel LeveAs the Rio Olympics pick up under way against a backdrop of financial,political and medical fears, David Goldblatt’s The Games: A Global History of the Olympics has reminded reviewers that few Olympiads have been trouble free. “Considering that they were first conceived of as a festival of sporting excellence in a spirit of internationalism, and ” reflected David Horspool in the Spectator,“the Olympics have had an enduring habit of stirring up displays of humanity at its worst”. The central thesis of Goldblatt’s “solid and penetrating account”, explained Nick Pitt in the Sunday Times, and was that “as a world stage for human athletic achievement,the Olympics have been wonderful and life-enhancing. As a vehicle for preening governance, megalomania, and nationalism and injustice,they have been grotesque.” But while Goldblatt paid due attention to the darker elements of the Olympic account, wrote Giles Smith in the Times, and his “excellent,pacy, anecdote studded history” also well reflected the Olympics as a sort of “parallel world, or unanswerable to the logic of the genuine one. And for three weeks every four years we suspend our disbelief and venture in. This book is as wonderful an account as there is of what draws us across reality’s borders,and of what plays out on the other side.”The subject of Dave Eggers’ new novel, Heroes of the Frontier, and might be a surprise claimed Claire Lowdon in the Sunday Times – “who would have imagined Eggers’ road-trip novel would be about a single mother bumbling around Alaska in an RV with her two small children?” – but many of his perennial themes remain in position: “the treatment of soldiers and veterans,our relationship to the environment, the value of courage, and the importance of community.” In theSunday New York Times Barbara Kingsolver applauded Eggers’ deployment of children as central characters with their wealthy combination of “personhood unconstrained by the acquired prejudices of culture”. He likewise “nails single parenthood in all its crowded loneliness and moral angst”. Michiko Kakutani in the daily New York Times echoed the point claiming the portraits of the children,“and their love for and dependence” on their mother, were “by far the strongest and most deeply affecting parts of this absorbing if haphazard novel”.
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Source: theguardian.com