Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

A Brief History of Seven Killings
A Brief History of Seven Killings
A Brief History of Seven Killings
Audiobook26 hours

A Brief History of Seven Killings

Written by Marlon James

Narrated by Robertson Dean, Cherise Boothe, Dwight Bacquie and

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

About this audiobook

On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert, gunmen stormed his house, machine guns blazing. The attack nearly killed the Reggae superstar, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Marley would go on to perform at the free concert on December 5, but he left the country the next day, not to return for two years.Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters-assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts-A Brief History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the 1970s, to the crack wars in 1980s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in the 1990s. Brilliantly inventive and stunningly ambitious, this novel is a revealing modern epic that will secure Marlon James' place among the great literary talents of his generation.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 15, 2014
ISBN9781622315383
A Brief History of Seven Killings
Author

Marlon James

Marlon James was born in Jamaica. He is the author of John Crow’s Devil (Oneworld, 2015), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and The Book of Night Women (Oneworld, 2009), which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction. His third novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld 2014), won the Man Booker Prize in 2015, the American Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for the International Dublin Literary Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His short fiction and non-fiction has appeared in Esquire and Granta. He is currently the Writer-in-Residence and Associate Professor of English at Macalester College, Minnesota, USA.

Related to A Brief History of Seven Killings

Related audiobooks

Historical Fiction For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for A Brief History of Seven Killings

Rating: 3.916506607293666 out of 5 stars
4/5

521 ratings57 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The quality of both the writing and the narration of this book are excellent, but the book is so violent that I can't face another session with it, so I quit listening before finishing the book. It's not like you can skim over the violent parts, because most of the book is violent parts, and it's hard to skim an audiobook. I had no idea that the killings would be described in such detail, or that they would be so brutal when I chose to listen to this book, and I find the relentless abuse of women and children very disturbing. The autiobook is beautifully done, so I'm giving it three stars for supurb writing and narration.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This novel was the book I kept running into last year. First it did well, and received accolades during The Morning News Tournament of Books, then it won the Man Booker Prize. In between those two events, it was the topic of many discussions and the receiver of many glowing reviews. It really didn't interest me, being described as being the complex story of an attempted assassination attempt on the Jamaican Reggae singer, Bob Marley, with the book being narrated by an uncountable number of characters and much of it in impenetrable dialect. It sounded like a book that was more appreciated than loved, and one that was fueled mostly by testosterone. All of those things that made me not want to read A Brief History of Seven Killings are true, except that, after the first few chapters, the dialect was not so impenetrable as I'd feared. There are a lot of characters narrating a chaotic and wide-reaching plot, but they are each different from one another, and the cacophony of voices serves to create a clearer picture, rather than to confuse. It is a story set in a deeply misogynistic time and place, both in Jamaica in the 1970s and New York in the subsequent decades, but James has put as the novel's most well-rounded and empathetic character, a woman as counterpoint. The presence of Nina Burgess in the novel does not completely counter the sheer quantity of rape, abuse and dismissal perpetuated on any woman unfortunate enough to exist in this novel, but it does remind the reader that women existed as people even when the men running things didn't see them as such. The novel follows a number of characters, as they negotiate life in West Kingston, and mostly in the slum called Copenhagen City. Marley, who is simply called the singer, is someone who can bridge the divide between the warring factions of the city, the two political parties whose conflict roams bloodily through the slums. He's a constant presence off-stage, as the various characters revolve around his presence, or absence. He's the never clearly seen center of the novel, giving it a structure and plot, so that what looks from the outside like chaos is really a carefully planned and executed look at Jamaican life during a tumultuous point in its past. For me, this novel worked best when I finally stopped wanting to understand what every word meant and how each character fit into the story. Once I just let myself just read, it fell into place around me. I still don't know what "bombocloth" means. This is a brilliantly written book that deserves the accolades which it has received; it's a book which pulls none of its punches and smooths none of its rough edges for ease of consumption.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "Preacher says there is a god-shaped void in everybody life but the only thing ghetto people can fill a void with is void." James is poetic but real in his book which is not only not "brief," but recounts more than "seven killings". This book is difficult, hard to read, transcendent.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Multiple narrators and a bunch of Jamaican slang made this book a very challenging read for me. Fascinating to see this description of Jamaica and the drug trade in the 70s through to the early 90s.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    It took me a long time to get going in this book, partly caused by a heavy dose of Jamaican street language (and violence), partly caused by a bewildering cast of characters, partly caused by the characters remaining role playing schemata with no depth whatsoever. Having said that abour halfway the language clears up, the characters get a hold on you and the book gets a grip on you. Undoubtedly a virtuoso performance from a literary perspective but as a reading experience rather disappointing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Would have been a great book if it had ended 150 pages sooner.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    excellent...worth looking up patois phrases if get confused in some passages. I got a discount copy of the paperback so I can better appreciatef a few sections .the extraordinary voice acting makes the Jamaican characters especially come alive. But the author's skill at varying his tone and point of view and voice is remarkable.
    And the excellent acting and Voice work along with the gripping narrative and Rich insights into all these different characters from all walks of society and races make it a compelling and exciting read. even if you just get the audiobook you should download the sample to your eReader of the opening section of the text version because all of the characters and their roles are outlined there in the very beginning.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I couldn't put this down!!! It's a wonderful book. Great storytelling!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This novel is anything but brief, but instead an epic story told from multiple points-of-view sprawling over three decades and spilling out of Kingston to New York City.  There also a lot more than seven killings depicted.  The title of novel is sort-of explained later in the narrative as a kind of story-within-the-story.The action of the story takes place over five days.  The first two are in December 1976 and detail the attempted assassination on Bob Marley (referred to throughout the novel as "The Singer").  Later sections of the novel are set on single dates in 1979, 1985, and 1991 and deal with the ongoing personal and political ramifications of the assassination attempt as well as the rising crack epidemic.  The narrators include gang members and dons of Jamaica's political party-aligned gangs, a CIA agent, an American music writer originally from Rolling Stone, the ghost of a murdered politician, and a young woman desperate to leave Jamaica for the USA who changes her identity several times throughout the novel.This is a challenging book to read due to its sprawling narrative and dozens of characters.  It's hard to keep track of the whole story and honestly I think some of the chapters may just as well be self-contained short stories.  The Jamaican patois used by many of the characters can also be difficult although I enjoyed listening to the voice actors on the audiobook. But the hardest part of the book is that is just so brutal, violent, and unceasingly grim.  That doesn't make it a bad book, of course, and I do like to be challenged.  But it was a hard book to read nonetheless.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I just couldn't finish this. Between the jamaican patois, the changing perspectives, and the length of the book conspired against me. Life's too short to finish books you don't love. I should have known. I haven't liked the Mann Booker prize winner in a long time.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A Long, Drawn-Out History of a Bunch of Killings

    Well, the book is actually called A Brief History of Seven Killings, but my title is more realistic. Parts of James Marlon's book are excellent (for example, the chilling chapter told from the point of view of a man being buried alive), but I would not have missed parts of it at all.

    The story is at first about an attempt on Bob Marley's life, which left him wounded but not dead on the eve of a peace concert; the narrative then expands to include drug gangs that made crack into big business in the US. The story is told from the points of view of myriad characters: not just the would-be killers and other gangsters, but also CIA agents in Jamaica, one of their Jamaican girlfriends, an American journalist, and so on.

    Perhaps as a woman I'm biased, but my favorite character is the girlfriend, who also once slept with The Singer, as he is known. She witnessed the attempt on him and spends the rest of the book fleeing and using false names. I like her persistence and cunning in the face of violence.

    However, many of the other characters began to blur together for me. Nonetheless, I'm glad I finished the book, as some loose pieces came together at the end. And I learned a lot of Jamaican slang, in which the worst curse word is a term for menstrual pad!

    Three little quotations:

    "Jail is the ghetto man university."
    "Peace can't happen when too much to gain in war."
    "...the quickest way to not live at all is to take one day at a time."
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A dense, sprawling, yet engaging novel that picks up speed in the second half. The setup is long and slow, but it does pay off if you've been paying attention.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This won the Booker. At 700 pages it is a solid piece of work and not for the faint hearted. Full of dialogue like “what kind of fuckery is this?” About three quarters of the way through I had a look at what some others thought about it. I was surprised at how many people objected to the swearing and stopped reading it. Can that be a valid reason to stop reading a book? But there is a lot of swearing so if you are bit lame don’t go there.

    I am not sure exactly what this book was about or even if that is a valid criteria, it is blood thirsty, violent, sexist and repetitive. But I finished it and found it rewarding. I am not sure if I “enjoyed” it as such as it is not an enjoyable book. Mostly dialogue makes it very readable but mostly in Jamaican patois can make that a bit challenging until you get you head around it and then it flies.

    There is nothing here to like and I’d stress how long it is but if you have a spare few months give it a go
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    High praise for a incredibly engrossing book. James gives us a set of arias by characters involved in the power struggles in the slums and government of Jamaica in the 1970s, and the fallout from the gang wars, political corruption and CIA involvement of the time, bringing the era forward to track the participants in the aftermath. The narrative is structured as overlapping monologues that don't hide the truth, but do provide different points of view so that the reader can piece together the action.These monologues give the characters amazing clarify, whether in Jamaica, in the era of Bob Marley, or New York or Miami. in the years that follow. Central are the characters of Josey Wales, brilliant and vicious, and Nina Burgess, a woman in the wrong place at the wrong time, scrambling to stay alive. As the political struggles, the fate of the slums, begin to fade into the cocaine and crack epidemics of the 1980s, we learn the fate of each of the people we have come to know.I'm reminded of the Schopenhauer curve described in The Naked and the Dead, as the drama and intensity climb through the narrative, and abruptly fall in the final chapters.I did become impatient toward the end as each character still alive reached, in their own way, a point of release. But that really did not diminish the power of this story.One thought about the language. James gives each character their own accent, dialect, and rhythm. I started reading the text, but decided to listen along to the recorded version to absorb the rhythm, pattern and grammar of Jamaican speech. Well worth the time.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This novel has been lurking on my TBR pile for two years, and after a false start, I was absolutely determined to read the whole thing this time. Nope. I don't usually review books that I abandon, but after getting halfway through - and 375 pages would have been a suitable length, I feel - I've realised that the plot just isn't going to progress any further, and I can't stand another 300 pages of Jamaican patois (badly written, apparently), violence and arrogant American characters. I don't have a problem with the language or even the macho bullshit, but I do object to reading the same chapters again and again. My fault entirely, I should have known better to avoid the winner of the Man Booker Prize! Life is just too short, but I'm claiming the half I did get through for my annual tally anyway.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Josey Wales is an ambitious gang leader with plans to take over the world. He is prepared to do anything to achieve this including taking over a rival gangs area and assassinating ‘The Singer’ a well known reggae superstar who is hoping to bring peace to his shattered country. The attempt fails, but Wales does manage to shatter the peace plans.

    In this seventies Jamaica nothing is straightforward; the politicians are crooks, the gangs are made up of evil thoughtless killers, and the CIA is involved in meddling in the affairs of the country, supposedly to stop a communist takeover from Cuba. But mostly being ineffective. As Wales climbs the greasy pole, he gets into the drug trade and it makes him rich, very rich. So America beckons but he may yet be betrayed by the only thing that he cannot control; his temper.

    This is a fictional account of the real events that took place in Jamaica in the 1970’s. ‘The Singer’, Bob Marley did survive an assassination attempt as he was preparing for a peace concert, and the gangs warfare was egged on by the political parties, spiralling out of control and ending up with a country where 600 murders happened in six months. James has tried to pull all this together to give us a story and it makes for grim unpalatable reading quite a lot of the time. Naturally he has got the patois off to a tee, and there is a storyline in there somewhere. It is full of pretty graphic violence between all the key characters and those unfortunate enough to come in range, with the CIA trying and failing to get a grip on the situation. Overall I didn’t feel that I got this book; I think that it was way too long and quite frequently felt tedious. If it was half the length it might have helped. There is a mass of characters in the book, some fairly distinct but a lot of the others seemed to blur into one mass of nastiness. Almost gave up, and almost gave it one star…
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A wonderful doorstop of a novel that won the Man Booker price in 2015. It tells a story of gangs, drugs, Jamaica, New York and Bob Marley (though James only mentions him as "The Singer"). It starts in the 70's on Jamaica, where rival gangs battle for dominance and there's a plot to assassinate the Singer. It jumps a couple years to revisit the characters (and there are many) and how the aftermath affects them. Then we jump again to New York in the late 80's when cocaine was king and AIDs was on the rise. Its a dense, story with lots of characters (that I only occassionally lost track of, good thing there's a Cast of Characters at the beginning). Some chapters were written in a Jamaican patiois that was both hard to read but very engaging. Perhaps the most interesting literary device that James used was the occassional "greek chorus" chapters where a dead politician from the 50's comes on to give perspective on the story so far. Excellent read, worth the time.Quotes:Preacher says there is a god-shaped void in everybody life but the only thing ghetto people can fill a void with is void.Whamperer tastes just like a Whopper, minus the taste. Even the lettuce knows it can do better, so wet and bitter on this burger that I order every day for shits, just so I can tell my kids, You know what I had today? Poppa had a Whamperer, and they think their pop has a stammer.Holy fucking horseshit, Diflorio, here's a fuckup that that makes a fuckup go holy fuck, now that's a fuckup. Jesus Christ, man, now does he do it?If a man call himself Rasta today, by next week that is him speaking prophecy. He don't have to be too smart either, just know one or two hellfire and brimstone verse from the Bible. Or just claim it come from Leviticus since nobody ever read Leviticus. This is how you know. Nobody who get to the end of Leviticus can still take that book seriously. Even in a book full of it, that book is mad as shit.9/10 S: 7/6/19 - 8/15/19 (41 Days)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wow. As dense a book as I've read in a good while. Thoroughly satisfying. The blurb mentions Tarantino and DFW but I was more reminded of Ellroy via Mailer's Harlot's Ghost. I'll need some recovery time as well as an extended visit to Wikipedia to sort out fact from fiction.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    James book is a dense novel told in a plethora of voices and from a similar number of perspectives. I have no idea how truly he reflects Jamaica here, but he has certainly created a fully inhabited, complex country with that name, a place that might well be a point to point analog of the "real" Jamaica. James' country is real, as are his characters. This is a masterwork, much of it written in Jamaican slang but one can pick up the rhythm of the language and meaning of unfamiliar words quickly as one reads.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I am not sorry that I read it but this is a book about ghetto living, gangs & drugs & violence, which I find distasteful. For me the best aspects were the political ones (the CIA involvement etc.). I found the book to be confusing at first but as I progressed the various narratives started to link up and form a picture. For me, a lot of the initial confusion was due to 2 things: 1) I didn't know anything about Jamaica (culture, politics, history) & 2) the dialect. The characters (many of whom I was surprised to learn were real people, not just "The Singer") assume a background knowledge of terms & situations that I just didn't have. That had its positive aspect as well since it forced me to investigate and thus learn something about Jamaica of this period (say 1976-1985) (something I doubt I would have done otherwise).
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was a great read, very raw, and probably not sanctioned by the Jamaican tourism board.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent. This book will test your patience - it's long, it has many narrators, different timelines, violent content, etc - but it will be worth it. I received the audio edition from Early Reviewers and it is magnificent. It's read by a full cast. The patois was an adjustment for a gringo like me but after I got used to it, it was a joy to listen to (content of the book excluded).
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A well written, quality book that I struggled with. Between shifting narrators, time periods, and dialects, I can usually keep up but this one lost me at times. I wanted to like it more than I did.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Very good, but not great exploration of a difficult moment in Jamaican history. This novel is at its best when it takes you into dangerous Kingston neighborhoods to explore gangland politics. However, there are also times when it is very slow going and some of these characters are difficult to get interested in. If you have an interest in Bob Marley, civil unrest in JA, or Kingston gangs--than you should check it out. If those aren't interests, you'll likely find this novel to be a very long 688 pages.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I just could not get into this book. I tried and failed. (Do you know how long it takes to read a 688-page book that you cannot get into? It takes a very long time.)

    I know a lot of people really love this book. It just wasn't for me.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Audiobook on CD - A thorough fictionalized examination of the modern history of Jamaica and Jamaican people, from the 1970s onward. The story is told through the eyes of dozens of different people of all different backgrounds and eventual fates. It's not an easy history to read, because the people do not have easy lives. The book involves, as the title clearly states, a lot of killing. There's a lot of drugs, and a lot of hate, and a lot of unpleasant people. There's no hero here.I greatly appreciated the scope and ambition of this epic, and the writing and different points of view were fantastic. Jamaican culture is a large gap in my world knowledge (one of many) and so I had no frame of reference for this story at all. I felt connected to each narrator due to the excellent writing, but more research would have been necessary for me to really get the big picture. Despite my general appreciation for this book as a work of art, I can't rate it very highly as an audiobook. The story is too long, too complex, and there are too many characters for this audiobook to work. I constantly wanted to stop and look things up. I wanted to know how things were spelled. During long passages I would forget who the narrator was and I couldn't just flip back a few pages. The only positive aspect was that the excellent audiobook narrators - and there were MANY of them - did a great job of differentiating characters and making me feel their emotions.4.5 stars for the book, 0.5 stars for the audiobook.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This Booker Prize-winning novel is built around the attempted murder of Bob Marley in Kingston in 1976. Amidst political turmoil and alarmingly escalating violence, several gunmen entered Marley's mansion two nights before he was to deliver a "Peace Concert;" Marley was mildly injured, his girlfriend and manager more dangerously so, but they all survived. The raid was assumed to be perpetrated by gang/posse members upset by Marley's apparent attempt to bridge, through music, the violent chasm between supporters of the People's National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). As the election of 1976 drew near, tensions between the two major parties were notable and gang-related violence steeped in the ideologies and loyalties of the parties was defining the public image of Kingston. Marley's novel is told from several first-person perspectives and it extends from the violent landscape of the mid 1970s in Kingston to the 1990s in New York and Miami, as Jamaican drug cartels branched out into lucrative American markets. Boldly written and exquisitely researched, the novel transported this white middle-class American reader into a subculture that is certainly terrifying but one that also, in James' deft hands, becomes almost comprehensible. The characters are vivid and deeply human. And the stories are heartbreaking, horrifying, and ultimately humbling as James astutely exposes the all-too-recognizable motivations of even the most brutal killer. He doesn't flinch; he is not making excuses or sugar-coating the devastation wreaked by the posses, the drugs, and the racial oppression and its companion, deep poverty. But he writes with compassion. Ultimately, the result is a gripping, moving, mind-blowing reading experience that I wholeheartedly recommend. I say "bravo!" and I will read more of this talented author's works.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This powerful weighty tale is told from multiple points of view -- black and white, straight and gay, educated and less so, powerful and (eventually) less so, alive and much much less so. The voices are distinctive, the characters honest in some essential sense, even as they are many of them crooks and murderers. While the "Singer" overshadows everything in this book, it is violence that largely permeates its pages as the animating spirit -- violence of every kind and persuasion, many of the acts crude and apparently senseless, and yet imbued with a certain logic when looked at from at least one character's point of view. The heroine of the tale is a survivor, a shapeshifter, a woman whose voice (and fear and yearning) remain constant even as her name changes. The men of the tale, nearly all of whom die in its pages, are brutal and clever and lyrical and passionate; their deaths do not end their voices; many ghosts speak in these pages long after they are gone. This is an epic tale; the language is relentless profane and often obscene besides. I was thinking in Jamaican curses for a month after I finished.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James, author: narrators: Robertson Dean, Cherise Boothe, Dwight Bacquie, Ryan Anderson, Johnathan McClain, Robert Younis, Thom Rivera.First, let me say that I gave the book three stars, although I did not finish it, could not finish it, because I could not get past the parts that I found too disturbing. There are readers, however, that this novel will very much appeal to, who will enjoy it completely for its authenticity and realism, and I do recommend it for them. For me, though, after listening to about two hours of a 25 hour audio of the book, parts of which I replayed several times to try and understand it more fully, although I rarely do not finish a book, I simply gave up on this one. Yes, the sentences were beautifully expressive and filled with imagery, and the book has won many esteemed awards, the Man Booker Prize among them. Yes, the narrators were very good in their realistic presentations of the characters with accent and personality that was completely appropriate. However, with all that said, the book was simply not for the timid of mind and heart, like me, because of its narrative.The book covers a period of time from 1976 to 1991 and its subject matter will most likely appeal to those interested in the past history and evolution of Jamaica along with Bob Marley’s career. A troubled island, Jamaica is described as rife with corrupt governments, poverty, rival gangs and crime, especially in certain areas of the country, like the ghetto which was ruled by lawlessness. However, the language in the book is nothing short of foul, the sex is grossly overt, the violent scenes are wildly graphic and curse words spout from the mouths of most of the characters regularly. The slang words and foreign language phrases were unintelligible at times, although the language of the book was English. I simply could not interpret many of the words spoken in the Jamaican dialect or in their foreign language. From my brief encounter, I found the text crude, peppered as it was with curses and brutality, and the behavior of most of the characters was immediately heartless and selfish, amoral and unethical. Even little children were able to inflict pain and commit murder with aplomb and exhibit no remorse. Mercy was non-existent. Perhaps a print book would have worked more successfully for me, but I don’t think so. When I checked out part of a print version, I realized that the vulgarity continued throughout.For those with a broader outlook, have a go at it, but be prepared, the tale is about a difficult period for Jamaica. It describes a group of people from a culture dominated by scarcity, destitution, illiteracy, a lack of respect for human life, dignity or decency, and a total lack of morality and ethics. The characters seem like thugs, gangsters, and prostitutes, all of whom seemed to prey on those weaker than them, with the strong completely dominating and terrorizing those weaker, at will. They had no moral compass, and I had no further interest in discovering anything further about them or their lives. If you are more inclined to be sympathetic to those that fail or suffer because of their environment and upbringing, who perhaps can’t rise above adversity because of a lack of opportunity, but who instead choose to harass and mistreat others to prove their own machismo and ignore their own failures, there might be some kind of a message here. I simply could not endure the presentation of such unlikeable characters and dialogue. I think if I decide to learn more about Jamaica, its people and its culture, I will read a non-fiction book that presents a more positive image, first and foremost, with information about its past and present problems included, but not in the horrifically graphic way of this book. As a disclaimer, since I haven’t finished it, perhaps my assessment needs refining. So if you enjoyed the book, accept my apologies, and let me know what I missed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Though it's almost always some combination of humourous, inventive, and profound, I still felt far too many pages to be a dull slog. The "plot" comes across as a patchwork of research highlights, losing purpose repeatedly and only barely sustained by the fun of the language.