As the Rio Olympics get under way against a backdrop of financial, political and medical fears, David Goldblatt’s The Games: A Global History of the Olympics has reminded reviewers that few Olympiads have been trouble free. “Considering that they were first conceived of as a festival of sporting excellence in a spirit of internationalism,” reflected David Horspool in the Spectator, “the Olympics have had an enduring habit of stirring up displays of humanity at its worst”. The central thesis of Goldblatt’s “solid and penetrating account”, explained Nick Pitt in the Sunday Times, was that “as a world stage for human athletic achievement, the Olympics have been wonderful and life-enhancing. As a vehicle for preening governance, megalomania, nationalism and injustice, they have been grotesque.” But while Goldblatt paid due attention to the darker elements of the Olympic story, wrote Giles Smith in the Times, his “excellent, pacy, anecdote studded history” also well reflected the Olympics as a sort of “parallel world, unanswerable to the logic of the real one. And for three weeks every four years we suspend our disbelief and venture in. This book is as good an account as there is of what draws us across reality’s borders, and of what plays out on the other side.”
The subject of Dave Eggers’ new novel, Heroes of the Frontier, might be a surprise claimed Claire Lowdon in the Sunday Times – “who would have imagined Eggers’ road-trip novel would be about a single mother bumbling around Alaska in an RV with her two small children?” – but many of his perennial themes remain in place: “the treatment of soldiers and veterans, our relationship to the environment, the value of courage, the importance of community.” In the Sunday New York Times Barbara Kingsolver applauded Eggers’ deployment of children as central characters with their rich combination of “personhood unconstrained by the acquired prejudices of culture”. He likewise “nails single parenthood in all its crowded loneliness and moral angst”. Michiko Kakutani in the daily New York Times echoed the point claiming the portraits of the children, “and their love for and dependence” on their mother, were “by far the strongest and most deeply affecting parts of this absorbing if haphazard novel”.
“After reading Ariel Leve’s memoir I wanted to hug my own mother,” confessed Rosamund Urwin in the Evening Standard. Leve’s account, An Abbreviated Life, of an Upper East Side bohemian upbringing by a narcissistic mother “is exquisitely written” says Lynn Barber in the Sunday Times, “but at times feels like an account of [Ab Fab’s] Edina Monsoon written by Saffy. One can sympathise with the daughter, but it is the mother who captivates.” In the Spectator, Helen R Brown found herself “caught between cheering Leve’s brave, calm testimony and the awareness of the pain it is probably causing a seriously disturbed elderly woman”. Although Leve is now an award-winning journalist, “she views adulthood as an extended ‘recuperation’”, Brown continued. “Getting the extraordinary facts down in this book after breaking contact with her mother is clearly part of that process.”
