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Each Side of the Pond Reviewed By Gordon Osmond of Bookpleasures.com
http://www.bookpleasures.com/websitepublisher/articles/8031/1/Each-Side-of-the-Pond-Reviewed-By-Gordon-Osmond-of-Bookpleasurescom/Page1.html
Gordon Osmond

Reviewer Gordon Osmond : Gordon is a produced and award-winning playwright and author of: So You Think You Know English--A Guide to English for Those Who Think They Don't Need One, Wet Firecrackers--The Unauthorized Autobiography of Gordon Osmond and his debut novel Slipping on Stardust.

He has reviewed books and stageplays for http://CurtainUp.com and for the Bertha Klausner International Literary Agency. He is a graduate of Columbia College and Columbia Law School and practiced law on Wall Street for many years before concentrating on writing fiction and non-fiction. You can find out more about Gordon by clicking HERE

Gordon can also be heard on the Electic Authors Showcase.







 
By Gordon Osmond
Published on May 31, 2016
 


Author:Alys Rickett

Publisher:Alys Rickett (Create Space)

ISBN:13: 978-1517313494




PURCHASE ON AMAZON

Author:Alys Rickett

Publisher:Alys Rickett (Create Space)

ISBN:13: 978-1517313494

Alys Rickett has meticulously assembled an illustrated account of her years in the U.K. and the U.S., for both of which countries she has palpable affection. The author would be the first to acknowledge her good fortune in being born in circumstances providing first-rate education in and exposure to a variety of fields and ample travel opportunities. Ms. Rickett has clearly made the most of those opportunities, and it is fascinating to hear of her contacts--some close, some less so--with key players in government, media, arts, and education as she wends her way back and forth across the “pond.”

There is a clinical, bordering on sterile, aura about the work that might make it, in some readers’ minds, more of a scrapbook than a themed or compelling narrative—more of a diary than a moving memoir. Introducing her one and only husband with a non-restrictive adjective clause and disclosing the given name of her one and only son within parenthesis does not signal much in the way of passion to follow.

The author is clearly a gifted editor, as evidenced by the substantial excerpts from her publication, the Quorum, the contemporary relevance of which is questionable. The book’s other fillers are lengthy examination questions about math, history, literature, and art posed, presumably for the purpose of comparison, by The Wheeler School (U.S) and Oxford and Cambridge (decidedly U.K.). I’m not sure why they’re there, but I am sure that I’d never perform well with any of them.

Ms. Rickett has performed an invaluable service to her family and friends with this intelligent, thoroughly documented, and beautifully illustrated account of her life, a few descendants, and more than a few ancestors. On this genealogy/biography fulcrum, there seems to be little to be learned from lessons for the future about which the author shows great promise of possessing.

Maybe later.