Canaan - Geoffrey Hill

Advantages: A moving, compelling and evocative personal account of a true hero.
Disadvantages: None

...INTRODUCTION We owe an immense debt of gratitude to the service men and women who have sacrificed so much to defend our freedoms, none more so than to the brave “Few*” of the Royal Air Force (RAF) who defended our skies against the sustained waves of bombers that the Luftwaffe hurled at English cities during the Battle of Britain in the autumn of 1940. (*the phrase comes from a Winston Churchill's speech made on 20th August 1940, when he said "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few ".) Geoffrey Wellum was one of those men, patrolling the blue skies in his Spitfire with his fellow pilots of 92 Squadron at the tender age of 19, an age where for many of us, the most important decision revolved around which pub to go to with our mates on a Friday night. He left school, at 17, to join the RAF two... Read review

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Advantages: funny and gentle
Disadvantages: slight

...After doing even tiny bit of research I realised that I must be the only person out there who ever read "Tim the Tiny Horse" having never heard of the author. Thus, I have to take another reviewer's word that it's "typical Harry Hill" and will make an attempt at reviewing Tim as a stand-alone. I am happy to say that it acquits itself well. Tim is a horse, blue and so tiny that he lives in matchbox with a tic-tac box for a conservatory. A single Hoola-Hoop makes his lunch (he prefers barbecue beef flavour) and a fly (called Fly) is his best friend. Tim doesn't do much - apart from a few not very successful attempts at making it big in the media he seems to spend his days watching television and socialising with Fly. The book contains several short morality tales featuring Tim; each of them is a few pages long, with a little text... Read review

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Advantages: Good as part of the series, good as a stand-alone text
Disadvantages: -

...The hills are alive... Oh wait -- that's another matter. Thomas Cahill's third outing on the hinges of history brings us to Jesus Christ, and appropriately so, for so much of the word 'hinges' on this person (and we'll define that word more closely in a moment) in many, often unknowing ways. Obvious hinges are the calendar which, even when modified to be BCE/CE rather than BC/AD cannot escape the fact that the break is with this phenomenon. Cahill has taken up the task not of showing who Jesus is, either as person (and that can be God-man, special prophet, political activist, or mythological figure) but rather to show some of the differences, a before-and-after, if you will, of what the world was and came to be due to the influence of this person, which obviously requires an examination of the influences on other persons, too... Read review

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