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If it ever comes back into print, it's well worth buying.
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What insight into human nature! And as an adult I appreciated the dry, understated humor. I also appreciated the spiritual insights -- that God will give us what we desire, but sometims uses circumstances we don't like to teach us truths that we couldn't learn otherwise.
When I was a girl I was often turned off by what was called "good reading," but for some reason, I enjoyed Heidi and it never seemed sappy or corny.
Very much worth reading!
I really liked this book. It was very real, in a sense that brought you into the actual story. When I read the book, I almost wished I was there in the book listening to their conversations, or eating at their little dinner table. Whenever the book got to eating the meals, it was so real that I got hungry! I would definitely recommend this book to any age group. The author really describes the scenery to where you can picture it in your mind. I loved the book, and I am going to read again.
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Swain writes evocatively and his book should serve as a handy introduction to Indochina and its travails for foreigners little in the know. But there's this, too, to say about "River of Time": rather than a panorama of scenes and events, Swain provides several vignettes of them (from Saigon at war to Phnom Penh at its fall to the Khmer Rouge and to Bangkok at peace from it all). And that's my gripe about "River of Time." Without clear guiding narrative strings and conclusions, it reads like several touched-up newspaper articles blended together and joined by only one unifying theme: Swain himself. Too bad, because the book is chock-full of revealing anecdotes, thanks to Swain's well-honed eye and prodigious memory (as well as contemporary diary notes). The stories about Vietnamese boat people's suffering at the hands of Thai fishermen-turned-pirates are perhaps the best in the whole book.
But don't let me put you off an interesting, if somewhat lacking read. For all its flaws, "River of Time" is worth your money and time -- if only in whetting your appetite for other books about this hauntingly beautiful but deeply troubled land.
Swain began to win me over right away. He begins the book with much the same sentiment as I expressed above. The author himself wonders what he can add to what's been written before.
The answer is: A lot.
Swain's style fits the subject: factual, but with humanity; horrified without being overwhelmed. The author's self-professed love for Indo-China is evident. The depth of his feelings enabled me to see and feel the end of Indo-China as it had been.
The highlight of the book is the description of the fall of Phnom Penh and the immediate aftermath. I have read several accounts of these events, written by Cambodians and Westerners, and I have seen "The Killing Fields". None of those tellings hold a candle to Swain's description. The misery, chaos, horror, insanity, and inhumanity comes to life in his words.
Swain's work takes it's place among the best of the field.
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The real problems come in Williams' seeming lack of full proficiency in modern English. I wonder if English is his second language, or perhaps he is from a nation with a non-American and non-British connotative dictionary of the language, because some of his awkward phrasing is truly distracting. Additionally, redundancy was common fare. It was distracting enough for me to dock a point, but I would have preferred to leave give it 3.5 stars seeing as I did like the book.
Finally, I have another general complaint, this toward almost all of science fiction, though the problem manifests itself frequently in this book. Air, when exposed to the vacuum of space, does not freeze! If it did, Earth's outer atmosphere would be entirely composed of frozen air crystals. It is not. Go look at a pressure vs. temperature diagram for air. At extremely low pressure, there is no temperature at which it can leave the gas phase. Also, I notice a lot of references to a substance exposed to vacuum "instantly" freezing. Think about this one, as well. On a cold winter day, an exposed object loses heat quickly. If the weather includes wind, the rate of heat loss greatly increases. This is because the main mechanism for heat loss from an object at about room temperature is convection. An object has to get up toward the thousands of Kelvin before radiation becomes fast enough to be significant. As a general guideline, we can assume that only visibly glowing things are losing a lot of overall energy through radiation. I'll get back to my point. In vacuum, there is no convection. Therefore only radiation is available to carry away heat. This makes heat loss much slower than it would be on a cold day in atmosphere.
Now I do like this book, though it may seem otherwise. It has some good writing and does have some important events: Jacen's return, the election of a new Chief of State, the reestablishment of the Jedi Council (it's called the High Council now), and the deaths of a few main\semi-main characters (as happened in the other three hardcovers of the series) and finally a book that's based on Luke! Though Han and\or Leia fans will be a bit disappointed; the two are absent in most of the book.
The book also has the introduction of a handful of new characters:
Supreme Overlord Shimrra, (sorry if it's spelled wrong) who probably have the most impact in future books, A few new senators, an alderaaian senator, Cal Omas, will have the most impact of these, and some new governmental (and Vong) officials.
Overall I think this is a good edition to the series, though it could have been the best if the plot was more centralized.
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If you decide to buy this book, do so only for the art, and not for the storyline. It's a shame, considering the vast talents McFarlane has at his disposal
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