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Wednesday, September 01, 2004

The History Boys - the new play by Alan Bennett - is the Book Club's new book

The school gives them an education. I give them the wherewithal to resist it. Examine a boy and he is tamed already. Only examine him and you can tax him, empanel him, enlist him, interrogate him and put him in prison. You have only to grade him and you have got him. An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form boys in pursuit of sex, sport and a place at university. A maverick English teacher at odds with the young and shrewd supply teacher. A headmaster obsessed with results and a history teacher who thinks he’s a fool. In Alan Bennett’s new play, staffroom rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it; about education and its purpose.

Click away to get your hands on a copy!

- National Theatre production
- Alan Bennett, wikipedia
- Alan Bennett, screenonline

Posted by Nick @ 16:02 GMT
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Boris Vian, L’Écome des Jours, 1947, Translated by Stanley Chapman as 'Froth on the Daydream'1967, 1970, 1988

Current Book Club Book on the Back Burner

Herman Melvills's 'Moby Dick

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Previous Book Club Books

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When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

Senhor Jose is an official in a registry office, with a passion for unearthing every detail and reconstructing people's lives from the bare data in the archive documents. One file in particular challenges him: a woman's date and place of birth are missing, and so he begins his research in earnest.

The school gives them an education. I give them the wherewithal to resist it. Examine a boy and he is tamed already. Only examine him and you can tax him, empanel him, enlist him, interrogate him and put him in prison. You have only to grade him and you have got him. An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form boys in pursuit of sex, sport and a place at university. A maverick English teacher at odds with the young and shrewd supply teacher. A headmaster obsessed with results and a history teacher who thinks he’s a fool. In Alan Bennett’s new play, staffroom rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it; about education and its purpose.

A panoramic vision of America at the beginning of the 21st century, seen through the turbulent lives of the Lambert family. This novel is a moving family drama and a dissection of American society in an age of greed and globalism.

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Writer Jake Donaghue's adventures in London and Paris include falling in and out of love, kidnapping a canine film star, and trailing a onetime friend.

Like its noteworthy ancestors (Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, the Ancient Mariner and Moby Dick) Life of Pi is a tale of disaster at sea. Both a boys' own adventure (for grown-ups) and a meditation on faith and the value of religious metaphor, it was one of the most extraordinary and original novels of 2002. The only survivor from the wreck of a cargo ship on the Pacific, 16 year old Pi spends 221 days on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal Tiger called Richard Parker...

Into the intrigue and violence of Indo-China comes Pyle, a young idealistic American sent to promote democracy through a mysterious Third Force. As his naive optimism starts to cause bloodshed, his friend Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, finds it hard to stand aside and watch.

Patrick Bateman is Harvard-educated and intelligent. He works by day on Wall Street, earning a fortune to complement the one he was born with. His nights he spends in ways we cannot begin to fathom - doing impermissible things to women. He is living his own American Dream.

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