Sunday at Borders - Too Tired Edition

Back from wedding in Nantucket, exhausted, and yet still I get this up. Wonder at me. New and reviewed this week:

Historical Fiction
The Ruby in her Navel, by Barry Unsworth, reviewed by Richard Mason for the Independent and Alex Butterworth for the Guardian. 1149, and Thurstan, Sicily's first metrosexual, is playing Muslims against Christians. Mason's not sure Unsworth gets the tone right, but still enjoys this "riotous period soap opera," and Butterworth thinks it's a "conspiracy thirller to shame lesser talents."

Restless, by William Boyd, reviewed by David Martin for the Independent. A single mother meets a former WWII spy: what could possibly go wrong? Apparently some of the writing, but Martin still thinks this is "a spy thriller from a first-rate narrative intelligence."

Imperium, by Richard Harris, reviewed by Andrew Rawnsley for the Guardian. Rawnsley thinks that folks who like "history dressed as fiction" will like this tale of Roman intrigue by a blockbuster author. He just wishes he'd write something more -- well, modern.

History
Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, by Nicholas Lemann, reviewed by Jonathan Yardley for the Washington Post, and Sean Wilentz for the New York Times. Yardley's too caught up in looking smart about the period to really review the book itself. But Wilentz thinks this "story of Reconstruction's demise ... is an arresting piece of popular history."

Will You Die With Me?: My Life and the Black Panther Party, by Flores A. Forbes, reviewed by Stanley Crouch for the New York Times. Crouch thinks that Forbes's memoir makes Huey Newton look like Jesse James -- and not in a good way. Flores was the a onetime military leader of the Panthers, and he gives "the inside story of a left-wing group of 'revolutionaries' whose organization evolved into a lucrative criminal enterprise."

The Conquest of Nature: Water, landscape and the making of modern Germany, by David Blackbourn, reviewed by Christopher Clark for the Times Literary Supplement. It's a grand story, "mythopoeic," even: a century of rectifications of the Rhine river in central Europe led to the Germany we know today. Blackbourne goes for the necessary labor porn (so many workers! so much time!), but also traces through the consequences of the rectifications.

Leonard Woolf, by Victoria Glendinning, reviewed by Vanessa Curtis for the Independent. Ignore "the many errors scattered throughout the book" - who really cares whether there's such a thing as a Bach "cello partita?" Glendinning's biography of that guy who married Virginia Woolf is "an absorbing read," even if it never explains why he took her name.

The Private Lives of the Impressionists, by Sue Roe, reviewed by Tom Rosenthal for the Independent. Oh look, another book about Impressionists! This one doesn't have as many pictures, but Rosenthal thinks that this "relatively slight but diverting book" has "a certain charm."