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EMPIRES APART: STOP PRESS
Lord Newby,
the Liberal Democrat Treasury Spokesman
in the House of Lords,
recently said of Brian Landers'
superb EMPIRES APART: "I
hugely enjoyed
Empires Apart. It's a phenomenal
piece of research apart from the
many
insights, which I wish were more
widely understood".
Lord Newby also saw
the US version of the book in "pride
of place" in Barnes
& Noble near Grand Central Station.
Bravo Brian, well
deserved.
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Empires
Apart
Matthew Bell, The Independent on Sunday: |
‘
................ Anecdotes of British
culture being rebranded for the American
market are legion – The Madness
of George III became 'The Madness of King
George' in case thickies wondered what
happened to Parts I and II. But it still
came as a shock to the historian Brian
Landers when a vital swathe of his book
'Empires Apart', a comparison of America
and Russia, was cut for the US version,
to avoid hurting American sensibilities.
"It's not anti-American," he
tells me, "but they didn't like the
parallels I drew with Russia. Funnily
enough there's a bit where I compare the
way the two countries treat dissidents:
in Russia they put them in mental asylums
or shoot them; in America they just don't
publish them."
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The Ghosts of Eden
Jackie Bailey, The Waverton Good Read
Award:
Last year I raved about
The Ghosts of Eden. It is a wonderful
book about twin boys growing up in Uganda.
The author, Andrew Sharp, is a medical
doctor and so it is packed with all those
intelligent observations about life that
doctors seem to acquire in abundance.
The book ended up on my top ten of 2009
list...
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