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Roger McDonald (1) (1941–)

Autor(a) de Mr. Darwin's Shooter

Para outros autores com o nome Roger McDonald, ver a página de desambiguação.

21+ Works 804 Membros 27 Críticas

Obras por Roger McDonald

Mr. Darwin's Shooter (1998) 406 exemplares
The Ballad of Desmond Kale (2005) 133 exemplares
1915 (1901) 82 exemplares
The tree in changing light (2001) 30 exemplares
Shearers' Motel (1992) 27 exemplares
When Colts Ran (2010) 21 exemplares
Slipstream (1982) 17 exemplares
Gone Bush (1990) 14 exemplares
Water Man (1993) 13 exemplares
Australia's Wild Places (2009) 11 exemplares
The Slap (1996) 8 exemplares
Flynn (1992) 6 exemplares
The following (2013) 6 exemplares
A sea-chase (2017) 6 exemplares

Associated Works

Writers on writing (2002) — Contribuidor — 29 exemplares
The Best Australian Stories 2007 (2007) — Contribuidor — 22 exemplares

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Críticas

Meet Syms Covington. Raised in Bedford and by the age of thirteen, left home and went to sea. This is no ordinary boy. Grown to reach six feet tall, Syms looked like a man. By fifteen years of age he was in the service of Charles Darwin as his hunter and collector about the HMS Beagle. In later years, Covington grapples with his religious beliefs which are in direct conflict with Darwin's theory of natural selection.
Confessional: reading Mr. Darwin's Shooter was like walking down a gravel road barefoot. Much of my effort was spent gingerly picking through the sentences, hoping to land on ones more comfortable and less complicated. McDonald chose to cram a lot of sharp edges into his short book. The running commentary on 19th century culture and society was important to keep the reader grounded in the time period, but ended up ensnaring and slogging the plot. Here is how I know I book will not hold my interest - I can't remember what was happening when I left off reading. I don't remember the last character on the page or what they did or said. Darwin isn't even introduced until nearly 150 pages in.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
SeriousGrace | 12 outras críticas | Mar 14, 2024 |
I'm in the painful process of culling my book collection and thought this particular book would be easy to cull: just another book of pretty pictures of coastlines etc. Instead, as I actually read it in more detail, I realised that it was a collection of the most iconic photos and photographers in Australia. Names like Olive Cotton, Peter Dombrovskis, Harold Cazneaux, Frank Hurley..and there is a photograph there that I have long attributed to Hurley....the photo of a ship in Antarctica taken from inside an ice cavern. (This was actually taken by Herbert Ponting in 1910). Lovely photos. Fairly large format (A4) And I can't bring myself to donate this book to charity just yet. Maybe I'll come back to look at the pictures again (though time is running out!!). Five stars from me.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
booktsunami | Feb 9, 2024 |
A good quick read. Another view of people in Australia's early colonial history.
½
 
Assinalado
SteveMcI | 12 outras críticas | Jan 5, 2024 |
Not one I enjoyed.

I'm don't think I'm in a place to appreciate literary fiction at the moment - I'm more interested in a good story - and I was frustrated with both the writing style and the plot. I didn't find it difficult to keep track of the characters but their motivations and emotions left me cold and for fuck sake, don't kill off a female character just to provoke a mental breakdown in a man, it's fucking irritating. Also how was Diana's death Francis' fault? AND after 90% of the book being a slow-burn, subtle exploration of manhood and coming-of-age, that last chapter of "Wally's gone and may or may not ever be seen again, Billy's gone mad and tried to murder everyone, and now Francis is kind-of flirting with a bloke she's never met and who was never really introduced to the reader, ok bye!" is massively incongruous and a terrible ending and I wish I'd given up on it earlier, honestly.

Writing style - for me, simile and metaphor should enhance what the author is trying to say. In this book, it usually left me going "huh?" and re-reading passages two or three times trying to puzzle out what McDonald was getting at.

If you want to know if you'll enjoy the writing style, the following passage sums up my peak exasperation (and please note, it's one sentence.

They walked away from the purpose that had brought them half way around the world and the decision just taken to go into battle without their horses; away from the human, the raw-tongued, the alarm and misapprehension that was their unseen but true uniform, and were forgiven - better, transported from - the sulking weight of their bodies by the brass rails of the bugle as they set off to do their grooming for the last time, gracefully absolved and released from all they had done and were about to do, draped by the wandering ribbons of the intricate bugling, which began now somehow to echo amongst its own earlier notes, entire phrases leaving for the silken distances of the sand-ocean only to return thin but re-charged to wander above the men as might glass rods (deep tinted blue) in a serene experiment of fate, creating a faint electricity to which the men thoughtfully submitted, scraps of hair rising under its power to attract the light and the harmless, scraps of wool, silk, feathers, paper, bran, gold leaf, and then all this movement joined by the sad brown heads of hundreds of horses in their picket-lines, heads shaking and bobbing with elastic polyphonic rhythm up up down as the men arrived and were greeted, nuzzled, ushered in to a last ritual embrace with the living things they had been called to care for.

(I thought maybe I would gain greater appreciation for that passage when I typed it out but nope, still immensely frustrated that that rambling, 233-word sentence made it past an editor.)

Anyway, I might just be too dumb for this book but I suspect I'm not the only one.
… (mais)
 
Assinalado
a-shelf-apart | 1 outra crítica | Nov 19, 2019 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
21
Also by
2
Membros
804
Popularidade
#31,726
Avaliação
½ 3.4
Críticas
27
ISBN
90
Línguas
3

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