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Reviews - October 2005
Brass
Helen Walsh
Canongate $23.00
Brass begins with a teenage girl buying the services of a prostitute.
They head to Liverpool's Cathedral and masturbate on a gravestone. The
book continues, with drugs, hedonism and la'ddish behaviour. At the cold
heart of it is a girl wanting to be a la', consuming porn, consuming
others sexually. She's just a crazy mixed-up kid, deep down really
lovable-or so the author wants us to believe. Think Puberty Blues gone
bisexual and Scally, but as secretly old-fashioned underneath its shock
voyeurism. Moreover, the book has the same plot resolution as Haddon's
The Curious Incident. Sounding Brass, tinkling cymbal.
POPULAR SCIENCE
Roving Mars
Steve Squyres
Scribe $35.00
Steve Squyres was the principal force behind the Mars Rover Mission.
This book is a scientific adventure story, how two robot roving
geologists travelled to Mars. But rather than battling pulp aliens,
Squyres and his team fought the funding process, bureaucracy, and the
technical problems of their mission. It was a brutal and arduous
process, also incredibly expensive. If anything went wrong, the mission
would fail: but instead it brilliantly succeeded. The Rovers even
carried fragments of the World Trade Centre buildings to Mars, a
memorial greater than any war. Roving Mars is a fascinating story, told
with nail-biting suspense. Recommended.
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