Related Items: Search

Average Rating:

.Naples '44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth

by: Norman Lewis

July 31, 2002
Norman Lewis's son is a friend of mine and has been for twenty years. For twenty years I've drunk beer, watched football, told jokes and (in the dim & distant past) chased girls with the son. I even met the father once. It was not until I read the back of a Norman Lewis book last year & saw the picture, that I put two and two together. "Yep, that's my Dad". Astonishing!

I read that book,A Dragon Apparent, and enjoyed it, but not really enough to run out & buy others. I dont read much travel writing in general but it was undeniably well written, interesting & felt it was doing me good. On a whim I bought this one, Naples 44, last week and it is a real step up. Dressed up as a diary of a place in time (there's a clue ... Read More:
>>See More Reviews & Details on Naples '44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth

Used Price: £5.07

Average Rating:

.Excellent Cadavers: Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic

by: Alexander Stille

June 06, 1996
I like reading about dedicated experts in a particular field. In this case, Judges Falcone and Borsellino, and others, taking on the mafia. It really is an interesting, shocking and moving story.
>>See More Reviews & Details on Excellent Cadavers: Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic

Used Price: £5.60

Average Rating:

.Voices of the Old Sea

by: Norman Lewis

January 12, 1996
The UK edition is a miserable production. For much the same price get the US edition published by Carroll & Graf through Amazon 'used and new' list, or Abebooks. It has a larger format with proper margins on nice paper and opens properly, but type only slightly bigger and still rather squidgy.
How fictional is the book? Reviews talk about Farol and Sort as if they're real places, but I can't find them. Does anybody know?
>>See More Reviews & Details on Voices of the Old Sea

Used Price: £2.84

Average Rating:

.Midnight in Sicily (Panther)

by: Peter Robb

May 06, 1999
This is an excellent book, but although there's some original stuff, it's really more a synthesis of the works of others than anything else. While Robb pulls it all together extremely well, he fails to attribute his sources adequately, using italics in an awkward and, for a reader, distracting fashion where he quotes other writers. He also neglects to relate specific quotes to their sources, which may have been an editorial decision intended not to put off the more casual readers. Nevertheless, this makes for a frustrating read at times. I kept seeing the work of Norman Lewis, in his riveting and beautifully written book The Honoured Society, quoted here without any direct attribution, and returned to that book often as I was reading Robb's. Lewis is far better, ... Read More:
>>See More Reviews & Details on Midnight in Sicily (Panther)

Used Price: £2.24

Average Rating:

.I Came, I Saw: An Autobiography

by: Norman Lewis

December 06, 1996
This is a wonderful book. Norman Lewis had a most remarkable and peculiar childhood and early adulthood. He was sent from proto-suburban pre-war Enfield to live with his grandfather and three aunts in Carmarthen, 'Welsh Wales'. All three aunts were a bit touched and hilariously funny descriptions by Lewis lighten what were in fact very sad, strange and pitiful lives. He captures the stultifying pettiness and conformity of deeply provincial lives with unsentimental clarity and insight.

Back in Enfield, his father, a very reluctant pharmacist, gave up his day-job to become a medium, he and Lewis's mother having embraced Spiritualism. Again. Lewis writes with laugh-out-loud humour about scenes and events that at bottom were really rather pathetic and not a little ... Read More:
>>See More Reviews & Details on I Came, I Saw: An Autobiography

Used Price: £1.97

Average Rating:

.A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam

by: Norman Lewis

August 29, 2003
This is a wonderful book. Norman Lewis had a most remarkable and peculiar childhood and early adulthood. He was sent from proto-suburban pre-war Enfield to live with his grandfather and three aunts in Carmarthen, 'Welsh Wales'. All three aunts were a bit touched and hilariously funny descriptions by Lewis lighten what were in fact very sad, strange and pitiful lives. He captures the stultifying pettiness and conformity of deeply provincial lives with unsentimental clarity and insight.

Back in Enfield, his father, a very reluctant pharmacist, gave up his day-job to become a medium, he and Lewis's mother having embraced Spiritualism. Again. Lewis writes with laugh-out-loud humour about scenes and events that at bottom were really rather pathetic and not a little ... Read More:
>>See More Reviews & Details on A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam

Used Price: £6.25

Average Rating:

.Semi-Invisible Man: the Life of Norman Lewis

by: Julian Evans

June 05, 2008
This is an outstandingly good biography. It is very long, agreed, but it is written superbly well and with great insight so that it becomes a real page-turner.

It peels back the layers of Lewis's contradictory character very objectively while interspersing the details of the man's life with ruminations on the nature of biography and speculations about the motives that drove his messy personal life and perpetual restlessness. Yet it does not descend into cod-psychology or into an apologia or -- despite the author's obvious affection for his subject -- into hagiography. It has obviously been crafted with great care and I have not read a biography I enjoyed so much for a very long time
>>See More Reviews & Details on Semi-Invisible Man: the Life of Norman Lewis

Used Price: £16.11

Average Rating:

.Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

by: John Dickie

March 08, 2007
by far the most interesting book I have read in ages, everything you wanted to know about the Mafia. And as everyone says, 'LEMONS!'?!?
>>See More Reviews & Details on Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

Used Price: £1.70

Average Rating:

.The Tomb in Seville

by: Norman Lewis

November 05, 2004
by far the most interesting book I have read in ages, everything you wanted to know about the Mafia. And as everyone says, 'LEMONS!'?!?
>>See More Reviews & Details on The Tomb in Seville

Used Price: £3.30

Average Rating:

.The Leopard: Revised and with New Material (Vintage Classics)

by: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

September 06, 2007
The quality and of writing of "The Leopard" was, for me, perfect. And this bearing in mind it was a translation from Italian. With the exception of the recent nasty (American-English) trend of using "what" rather than "that which", it was English at its best. I would like to read it in Italian some day, but at my level, this would have been hard work. It was just a shame it was not longer. I could see the point of the 20 year gap in the story but it would have been so much more interesting if it had been a continuous story. However, bearing in mind that as one of the few that found "The Grapes of Wrath" one of the most disappointing books I ever read (talk about "The Kings New Clothes", I will never understand why everyone raves about the manufactured English and inconsistently story ... Read More:
>>See More Reviews & Details on The Leopard: Revised and with New Material (Vintage Classics)

Used Price: £2.96