Francis Rossi

Advantages: A must for all fans
Disadvantages: None

...The now 7 times world motorcycle champion gives a frank and honest account of his time with Honda and his move to Yamaha. He also gives a fascinating insight into his childhood times in Italy and his introduction to motorcycle racing by his Father, himself a racer. The first half of the book tends to deal with the unbelievable choice(at the time) to move from the all conquering Honda Racing to the struggling Yamaha. Tired of the assumption that it was the bike and not him winning the races Rossi decided to take the world on and prove them wrong(as we now know he has). His rivals at the time gloating at the fact may just be eating humble pie right now. Some amazing accounts of how multi million pound deals were taking place in the dead of night, hidden away in race track medical centres !!!! Truly unbelievable, but as you get a feel... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average off topic

Advantages: Looong read for the cold winter nights
Disadvantages: Slim on thrills

...without the appearance of the central villain of the piece a bit of an ask. By the time he does finally appear, I had lost the will to care. Perhaps if I had forced myself to read the book less languorously, but like the vampiric hero, I had better things to do than devote my time to this draining book. The narrative jumps around, from the present where the daughter of a professor (supposedly the main, unnamed narrator) is recounting searching for her missing father in the 1970's with a young English male companion (Stephen Barley), to the 1950's, where the girl's mother, Romanian born Helen, is searching for HER professor father, Bartholemew Rossi (who was on his own Dracula hunt in the 1930's, where he met Helen's mother - phew!), with a young male companion (her future husband& the girl's father, Paul), all of it intertwined... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful

Advantages: A brilliant, in - depth look at ancient history
Disadvantages: Too long.

...The Historian The Historian is a 2005 novel by Elizabeth Kostova about a quest, reaching through the past five centuries, for the historical Dracula. The story begins with the narrator first discovering a very old book with a wood carving print of a dragon in the center of the book. When the little girl asks her father about these items, he begins to tell her about how he came to find the unique blank book at a university in America. When he was unable to discover whom the book belonged to, he took it to his mentor, Bartholomew Rossi, and was shocked to find that Rossi himself had also found one of the books when he had been a graduate student in much the same manner that Paul had found his own book. He had traveled to Istanbul, doing research and the appearance of curious characters and unexplained events cause him to drop... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful