Sam Kates's Blog - Posts Tagged "book-review"

The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken by The Secret Barrister

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


At times scary, humorous or shocking, this is an eye-opener for anyone who knows little about the British criminal justice system. Severely underfunded and stretched to breaking point, it’s a wonder the entire system hasn’t yet shuddered to a halt.

For many years I worked in the legal profession in high street practices in South Wales. Although I only ever dipped my toe into the murky waters of criminal litigation, I know enough for the scenarios outlined here—both real and theoretical examples—to strike a stark chord.

Yet a legal background isn’t necessary to enjoy this book. Written anonymously and clearly and compellingly by a practising barrister, it’s a sometimes amusing, often grim outline of the problems besetting the current practice of criminal law in England and Wales.

‘Enjoy’? Yes, in parts. Others will make readers want to gnash their teeth in impotent outrage. A case, I think, of read it and weep.




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The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This has been on my to-read radar for over forty years, but I kept putting it off because I suspected I would find it upsetting.

Indeed. Every time Anne began a sentence with ‘After the war…’, my stomach turned over or a lump appeared in my throat. There’s a moment when she’s talking about the loss of her fountain pen, which she accidentally threw with some rubbish into the incinerator, that made my blood run cold. She wrote:

“I’m left with one consolation, small though it may be: my fountain pen was cremated, just as I would like to be some day.”

(view spoiler)[Anne survived Auschwitz, dying in early 1945 of typhoid in Bergen-Belsen, but I could not help associating her comment with the crematoria at Auschwitz that were used to dispose of thousands of executed corpses. (hide spoiler)]

Reading the diary provoked a range of emotions, from bittersweet humour to fist-clenching anger, all underpinned by a constant sense of deep sadness. I’m not sure quite what I was expecting, but Anne doesn’t have any special insights into the workings of the nazi terror machine from which she and her family were hiding, and why should she? She’s an ordinary teenager—a bright one, granted, and what a beautiful writer the adult Anne would probably have become—distracted by some of the same sort of things teenage girls today might have on their minds: boys, schoolwork, her developing sexuality, her relationship with her parents, what she might become when grown up.

It's her very ordinariness that makes what happens to her all the more horrific and her writings all the more powerful.




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Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


If ever a novel didn’t need a sequel, it’s Ready Player One. That story came to a full and satisfying ending, leaving no loose threads needing to be tied. It was with a measure of foreboding and reluctance that I read the sequel.
The sense of foreboding was well justified. Where the first book is fresh and fun and original and exciting, the sequel is forced and turgid and contrived and so, so disappointing. Oh, and the protagonist is now a complete jerk.
I forced myself to slog through it, never caring about the characters or the outcome of their struggles, though perhaps ‘struggles’ is overstating it a little—I never felt they were in any jeopardy that a handy deus ex machina wouldn’t get them out of.




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