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The New Confessions

The New Confessions

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This book is classified as a novel but one could also think of it as a fictional memoir. Todd is born at the turn of the century and at the book’s end he’s about seventy-three. In the course of his life, he’ll marry and father several children, divorce his wife and begin a long time affair with a female film star having the unlikely name of Doon Bogan. She’s a Communist sympathizer and this will cause big problems for Todd. The previous edition of this now-classic book revealed the existence and subversive manipulations of "economic hit men. John Perkins wrote that they are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. In Perkins's case the tool was debt-convincing strategically important countries to borrow huge amounts of money for enormous, development projects that served the very rich while driving the country deeper into poverty and debt. And once indebted, these countries could be controlled. Boyd has created an important and complex character in a vividly evoked series of settings. . . . He has written a subtle and provocative history of our time." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review Wow!!!!! It is difficult to condense this book into a precise review. I will say that as funny as it sounds, this book was a life changer for me. Which he needn’t be, since none of his actions really matter. The book was fun, but in truth the “Economic Hit Man” was a nobody. Allow me to elaborate on that, through the story of my own country.

A 20th Century Masterpiece. So utterly convincing at times you wonder if it's all true! William Boyd seems equally at home depicting scenes of domestic drudgery or the glamourous life of the artist in pre-war Berlin. Pathos, farce, tragedy, it's all here. there are some brilliant passages describing life in the trenches of the First World War evoking the horror, boredom, futility and heroism of life on the Western Front. Equally well written are the laugh out loud sections. Perkins starts an alternative energy company, IPS, that flourishes. He also accepts a lucrative consulting job in exchange for promising not to write a tell-all book. Former economic hit man John Perkins shares new details about the ways he and others cheated countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Then he reveals how the deadly EHM cancer he helped create has spread far more widely and deeply than ever in the US and everywhere else—to become the dominant system of business, government, and society today. Finally, he gives an insider view of what we each can do to change it. John Perkins deserves credit for writing such a good, informative and interesting book about the work of an economic looter. Even though he's a resident of the United States but he makes it clear to the world what his country's higher authorities are doing against the world it's great quality & virtue of a open minded writer, he also clarified how many threats & difficult situations he faced while writing & publishing this book,nevertheless, the book has been published & translated in many languages as well & the author of book is still alive & he is roaming freely in different areas of world, this is the sign of a free country a real democratic country.And to be fair, he does bring evidence and examples to bear to his argument. I just feel like he over-claims based on the evidence he does bring to bear, and it does feel to me that he has deliberately inflated his own insider status SO he can write and sell this book. It's clear he's a good salesman. When William Boyd decided that he wanted to be a writer, at the age of 19 or so, he had, he says, a fairly shadowy notion of what a writer's life might be like. The ambition descended on him in Nice, where he studied for a year between school and university and "started writing these little vignettes and mini-stories. I started to fantasise, in the way you do at that age, about my future life, and I wanted to be a novelist. But I didn't know anybody who had anything remotely to do with the world of literature, didn't know any writers or publishers or agents. The fantasy of being, as Chekhov said, a free artist was coloured by novels I'd read or movies I'd seen. That was where I got my information from. So it was a sort of parodic version: get up from the typewriter, stretch, mix yourself a drink, step out on to your balcony and look at the sea. That was the life for me ..." I recently reread The New Confessions by William Boyd. This is one of my favorite books, and rereading it is always a pleasure. That can't be said about a lot of books, even ones I liked a lot the first time around. The Baron in the Trees also has that quality, and they have an unusual connection in that each touches on the European Enlightenment. In a startling opening paragraph narrator and protagonist John James Todd claims that he killed his mother by being born. He had a tough childhood because his father didn’t like him much and wouldn’t spend much time with him. He is a Scotsman who ran away from school when he was seventeen to join the army, about a year before the end of WWI, just in time for the battle of Ypres. Author William Boyd gives us plenty of gory detail on the terrible battlefield conditions. Todd is captured by the Germans but survives the war and becomes a movie photographer, script writer, and eventually a film director. All of this is covered in the first one-third of the book.

The first two thirds of Perkins writing are detailed accounts of his life and career as an Economic Hit Man. I found a strong connect to Perkins for a couple of reasons. #1 While I was a young teen attending Jr. High School in the Panama Canal Zone, Perkins was working to persuade General Omar Torrijos of Panama to align himself with the U.S. When Torrijos didn't cooperate, he suddenly died in a fiery plan crash. #2 In retrospect, I, like Perkins, have realized that my career was driven by greed, ego, and so many other facets that I now regret. There is an interesting parallel theme with the life of Jean Jacques Rousseau - who shares more than just his first two initials in common with our main protagonist - which is developed throughout the book. I suspect the novel could be re-read a dozen times, and all of the references would still not be fully apparent. It adds another interesting sub-theme to the narrative.

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The New Confessions is a long and tortuous journey through life and art and the novel is remarkably innovative. It is the most ambitious and intellectual book by William Boyd and unarguably his best. He later ends up captured by the Germans and held as a prisoner in Weilburg and Mainz (oddly, I've been to both these towns too, though as Todd is a POW throughout these sections, I'm not sure that added anything for me. It is while being held as a prisoner here that he meets a German guard Karl-Heinz, who lends him a copy of Rousseau's The Confessions, which becomes an obsession for the rest of his life (I do wonder whether there might be aspects of this book which can only be fully appreciated by someone who has read The Confessions, but on the other hand, I think this is as much as anything a story about a life driven by an obsession, what that obsession happens to be is of only secondary importance. William Boyd writes a gripping narrative and does a great line in flawed, self-absorbed but ultimately charming male characters. I was completely swept up in this story and sorry to finish it. So why not five stars, I hear you ask? Two things. Characters who are engrossing, and who we can identify with as being either a bit like ourselves, or like other people we've come across in real life? Of Scottish descent, Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana on 7th March, 1952 and spent much of his early life there and in Nigeria where his mother was a teacher and his father, a doctor. Boyd was in Nigeria during the Biafran War, the brutal secessionist conflict which ran from 1967 to 1970 and it had a profound effect on him.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
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