Stealing Athena By Karen Essex

Wonderfully researched, the story transverses the time of the Napoleonic Wars when a young heiress marries the British Ambassador to Constantinople and Greece two millenna earlier. The Ambassador, Lord Elgin, is determined to get permission to deconstruct the Parthenon and Athena’s Shrine, his beautiful and charming wife, Mary, helps him to obtain the firman . This will eventually cost him his fortune, his wife’s fortune and eventually his marriage. Two thousand years earlier, Apasia, a female philosopher and courtesan assists Pericles in defending the idea of building the exquisite monuments for the glory of Athens.
The descriptions of life in early Greece are fascinating; the powerful notion that the Greek Gods rule all aspects of life and that Athena was responsible for all good and directly punished all bad played a central part in the theme. Interestingly, the novel described a trial in Athens where Apasia is accused of insulting the gods, the manner in which she is accused and her limited defense because she was a woman. Mary Elgin is also tried in court for adultery and as an "unfit" mother.
The author, Karen Essex, has taken characters out of history and put them into a splendid tale of romance and adventure. This was an excellent read! Ms Essex’s other novels include very strong heroines.

Foundation and Earth By Isaac Asimov

Asimov’s extraordinary and remarkable "Foundation" series is a masterpiece of science fiction. It started as a trilogy and was first published in 1951.


"Foundation"
Mankind has escaped Earth and has colonized the Galaxy; there are hundreds of thousands of worlds peopled by billions of people. A galactic Empire has been formed with great technical achievements and great cultural differences. A professor of Mathematics, Hari Seldon has worked out a plan that he calls "psychohistory which, if followed ,will enable the leaders of the Empire to see and understand and predict things that will happen in the future. The Empire has ruled for 12,000 year but it is dying and Seldon through psychohistory foresees a "dark age of 30,000 years. In order to preserve knowledge and technology he pulls together the best minds and places them on a remote planet. He calls the sanctuary the Foundation.
"Foundation and Empire"\
"Second Foundation"
The Next two novels deal with the experiences of the fledgling Foundation, the rise of the Empire and the founding of a second Foundation and battle between first and second Foundation.
Asimov, also, wrote other amazing novels; he wrote a "robot" series wherein he created the laws under which all robots must act and in this series he took us back in time to when mankind first developed interstellar travel and began to escape Earth. The characters, the stars and planets, and the different cultures including a world where all activity was conducted by robots, become a hazy background in the later written additional two "Foundation" novels.
It is such a pleasure to read this authors novels and short stories. Other science fiction authors owe a lot to Asimov for his creative ideas.

Foundation's Edge By Isaac Asimov

This is a reread that I recently finished along with the conclusion to the "Foundation" series.

The Queen's Gambit By Walter Tevis

Only some one who loves the game of chess could have written this delightful story of an eight year old orphan who learns chess from the janitor of the institution she was placed in when both her parents were killed in an accident. By the age of sixteen she is competing for the US open Championship and she goes on to play international Masters and Grand Masters. The intriguing part of the novel is the authors ability to bring the reader to the chess board so each move and the strategy for the following moves is shown to the reader. The girl, Beth, is clearly a chess genius. She studies and plays all the masters and can play the games in her head with out a chess board. The story of her growing to an adult and her many chess matches unfolds with excitement and suspense and a certain amount of pathos. This was an excellent novel; I wanted to get my board and follow the games.

Escape From Andersonville, Gene Hackman and Daniel Lenihan

A Union officer and what is left of his command are sent to Fort Sumter, Georgia. The POW camp called Andersonville. Living conditions are a nightmare; sickness, no sanitation, no shelter, hardly any food and death and disease are all they can look forward to. As an officer, Nathan Parker could have opted for a different camp but he chose to stay with his men. Parker plans a daring escape hoping to induce the army to raid the camp and release the prisoners but after many hardships, when he gets to Washington, he meets resistance and disinterest in his request even from General Grant. Nathan is offered a discharge and a medal and told to forget it!~He gets together a group of mercenaries and tries to rescue his men . This was a good story about loyalty and courage and the awful things that went on during the last year of the Civil War.

Sir Gwain and the Green Knight Translated By Simon Armitage

A poem dating from around 1400 discovered and first published in 1839. It tells the story of a giant of a man dressed in green with green hair and a green beard who suddenly appears in Camelot at the Christmas festivities of Arthur and his round table knights with his green horse carrying a huge ax. He is willing to join the Yule dinner but after the feast he throws out a strange challenge. He will kneel and bare his neck and invite any knight to take the great ax and take the first whack. The condition is that one year from now, that same knight must seek him out and allow him to do the same. Sounds suicidal on the part of the giant but Arthur and his men are cajoled into accepting and Sir Gwain does the deed. The giant loses his head but the arms feel around and pick it up whereupon the eyes open and the head speaks reminding Gwain of the bargain.
The adventures and trials and temptations of Gwain as he seeks out the Green Knight are told in the poem. On the left of each page is each line of the poem in the original Germanic Old English, on the right is the translation. Fascinating and absorbing story.

The Seven Sins By Jon Land

"To Dream...To Dare...To Win; a moto etched on an ancient amulet supposed to have been created by King Mita, later known in mythology as King Midas is discovered and lost and found again by Caesar, Alexander and other notables and then finally discovered by a Sicilian fisherman. The amulet and it’s history are important in the story of the rise to power of a young Sicilian orphan who creates the largest and most expensive casino in Nevada, "The Seven Sins". He is a ruthless man with close "family" ties to the Mafia and personal contacts that include the world’s wealthiest people.
Shortly after the 9/11 attack, a multiple bomb attack on several casinos in Las Vegas attributed to a terrorist, cause the tourist trade to stop and consequently huge losses to the casinos. Michael Nunziato, takes it upon himself to find and destroy the terrorist who has promised an even more devastating attack in the very near future.
This is a well done story full of action and suspense; strong, believable characters and a grand finally. Jon Land has written 23 novels including
another favorite of mine "Blood Diamond"