Koning writes so cleanly, without extraneous words, that it is hard to put his books down. The story just moves right along without digressions. And his style of writing short chapters makes his books even cleaner to read. Just a great novel.

Both the threads in this novel, one set after the Paris Commune, and the other in the Second World War, are interesting. The author has done a wonderful thing : wrapping complexity in a narrative that carries you through with pleasure. The exploration of coincidence, concurrence is interesting, and reminds us how often we pattern our lives with attention to this aspect. Be sure I noted that the most important female character shared a name with my aunt. These little things stand out in our lives.

I picked up Zeeland when I was still reading McCullough's John Adams bio, thinking I would skim through, get a feel for it, and set it aside. I couldn't put it down. The strong narrative voice drew me in within a few pages and the characters kept me involved. Zeeland is easily the most readable novel I've picked up this year, and this had been a competitive year! I plan to recommend it to my men's book club.

Koning's novel about two people who get married almost immediately after meeting and falling in love is a crushing story about how two people can live and be in love, not seeing eye to eye. It is about how unhappy lives are lived. I had never read a love story that portrayed love this honestly, but this one really succeeds. Granted, it isn't the story of all loves, but of a failed attempt at it by two people who wanted it to work.

I read DeWitt's War about 15 years ago and I have never forgotten it. There was something about the story that was "haunting". It not only captured the mood of an occupied country during the Second World War, it also captured the mood of a man who was determined to right a great wrong, no matter the discomfort or danger.

The book never explained why Jerome Witt (the protagonist) acted in this fashion. It seemed that this was part of his character - a man of integrity who would never shirk his duty or abandon his ideals.

This book was also a great detective or suspense novel. The ending is stunning! I highly recoomend this book

I can see why some would compare the writing style to Hemingway, but Dermout's imprint is clearly a feminine one. The language is simple and the sense of nostalgia it conjures is rich and complex, but it is never tinged by the scent of spilled beer - rather, crushed flowers. This is a dreamy tale with a core of sadness. Read it aloud to someone and notice how your appreciation of the story grows.

The Ten Thousand things seems to be a book that inspires comparisons. I've heard Thoreau and Hemingway mentioned, and for my part I kept thinking about Muriel Wylie and Annie Dillard. The Lady of the Small Garden and her night of murders is a wonderful manner to trace life on these Indonesian islands, providing a lush backdrop for the author's meditations on life. Unfortunately, there are places where the translation from the Dutch is a bit clunky and breaks up the text. But those moments are almost entirely forgivable.

Dermout's classic novel is the kind the New York Review of Books Classics loves to bring out: a cult favorite with a one-of-a-kind flavor. The dreamy, simple tone belies the extreme formal complexity of the work: actually consisting really of a novella and several appended tales, the work brings everything together at the conclusion. This is a book to be read and re-read; its mysteries are not readily plumbed but are rewarding nonetheless.

Koning gives a very valid speculation on Columbus' life and voyages. Thoughout the years, the story of Columbus has been twisted and glamourized, making the people of America believe that he was a hero. Koning goes in to great detail when explaining the truths behind all these mythological ideals. It is an easy read as well as a very good piece of writing.

This is a book that attempts to set the record straight on Columbus the man and the chain of events set off by his voyage of discovery. Koning does not delight in debunking the myth, nor does he gloat in the exose'; rather the tone is one of moral despair over the actual facts. Essentially the Christian Spaniards slaughtered and enslaved as they plundered the New World. Convinced he had found the fabled way to Cathay ahead of the rival Portuguese, Columbus appears every bit the avaricious social climber of his era. Skilled and daring, he was also venal and petty. Koning's portrait is not a pretty one, but then we've had enough of those.

Koning takes the revered Samuel Eliot Morrison to task for his sanitized portrait of the Great Explorer. Most reprehensive, in Koning's view, is Morrison's utter disregard for the death and destruction left in Columbus's wake and to which he was a party. Seemingly, Morrison's brand of biographical myopia represents a particularly deadly brand of Western ideology at work, one that cleans up the official record on behalf of the powers that be.

Perhaps most praiseworthy in Koning's tratment are the succinct moral parallels he draws between the civilizing forces of Spain in the New World and their 20th century American counterparts in Vietnam, where additional tens of thousands were slaughtered resisting Western conquest. A book like this exposes unmistakably the self-serving mythology that surrounds so much of our official history. Such versions are not misleading by accident, instead they work to a purpose and there seems no better word for describing that purpose than ideological. They are distortions that preserve current institutions of power; namely, those political and economic arrangements that also happen to be products of Columbus's bloody wake. It's interesting to speculate the direction our polity would take were Koning's book, rather than the traditional sanitized versions, required reading in the nation's high schools. Be that as it may, don't expect to see Koning in a Columbus Day parade any time soon.

A stirring account of revolutionary organization and unrest in an unnamed European country. The Dutch-born author, who escaped Holland and fought with the British in World War II before moving to this country, has a very long and honorable main career as a radical journalist.

The conflict imagined in this novel is of the sort that dominated Western history from 1848 through the present. Koning is very much on the side of the revolutionaries -- who would dare to call them "terrorists?" -- but he is never blind to their weaknesses and failings.

In 1970, this novel was made into a first-rate if underappreciated film starring Oscar-winner Jon Voight as the title character.

What did a man have in mind when he marked his footprints on the islands he must conquer? 'I' -the main character- chose to surrender in the faces of grass, forest, waves and sand. To "the narrator", those islands -as fertile as a womb of a young woman - stole his identity and turned him into a complete stranger.

Published in 1952, this fiction was considered as masterpiece of one of the most important writers of the modern Dutch literature era, Albert Alberts. In 1939, he was posted in Sumenep Madura East Java and lived a paradise-like life. His dream turned into nightmare in 1942, he was captured by the Japanese soldiers. Transferred from one cell to another, he almost lost his life. He became free when the Japanese fled from Indonesia. After a year of uncertain life during the power-shift from Dutch to England, he decided to return. In the Netherlands, he published 'The Islands'. He became a journalist and an editor of a local newspaper in 1953-1964, following the same path Hemingway once took, and wrote mostly about Indonesian politics. In 1975, Alberts received a prestigious Constantijn Huygens Prize award.

Via 'The Islands' we can look into the life of a conqueror, on how he scrutinized the islands to exploit and on how he deconstructed his values along with his interactions with the locals. From these short stories, we can look on how a simple man tried to cope his loneliness, on how the ugliness of his exhaustion transformed into a weave of reminiscences.

His personal touches is obvious in Alberts' ignorance to write complete his sentences with 'subjects' or 'predicates'. He didn't care to place the islands in the structure of reality. Only in one of 11 short stories, did Alberts state the island's name (and it's an imaginative one). Alberts let his readers to freely interpret the context of time and space. Therefore, the editor completed Alberts' work by giving 9 pages of footnotes, 7 pages of preface and 21 pages of introduction.