Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 10:38:58 -0500
From: "Michael Walsh" <MJW at mail.press.jhu.edu>
To: <wsfalist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] My Whittemore Reprints
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

This, from the "NY Review of SF", is a good catch-all description of the =
books I recently reprinted.

"And so ends the ambitious Jerusalem Quartet, a veritable catalogue of =
wonders, a fantastic sequence of tales from a modern day Scheherazade =
where a giant English explorer comes to secretly own the Ottoman Empire, =
where a pious Albanian monk forges the original Bible, where an Irish =
rebel becomes a Poor Clare nun on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where a =
survivor of the 1854 Charge of the Light Brigade whiles away the years as =
a dancing priest baking bread in Jerusalem, where a Japanese Buddhist =
converts to Judaism and becomes a committed Zionist, where an obscure =
dealer in Antiquities has lived for 3000 years, where saints and sinners, =
secret agents, egyptologists, dragomen, mummy dust dealers, oil millionaire=
s, gun runners all commingle in what Whittemore terms 'the constantly =
shifting images of a tapestry we call history'.  "

Not SF, nor is it really fantasy, the books are . . . . well, pretty =
weird, but in their own way perhaps explain much of the Middle East.

mjw