Reviews for A Comparative Grammar of the Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, German, and S...

The average rating for A Comparative Grammar of the Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, German, and S... based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-03-03 00:00:00 Mark Ballard It’s Christmas time and I’ve been kind in upping two and a half stars to three. The ‘real’ Joan, and all her imagined selves, are tall, freckled, flat chested, strong willed and want to make history. Quite what makes history is not clear. The Joans adventure sometimes, love sometimes, run away quite often - from home, from men and from responsibility. They’re not inclined to curb their emotions, and sometimes behave badly. The themes floated here form the backbones of Kate Grenville‘s later novels dealing with the colonization of Australia and the conquest of its Aboriginal people. Her imagined Joans include a convict woman, aboriginal women, poor women in rural isolation and, lastly, an awkward wife of a rural mayor at the celebration of the Federation in 1901. I kept going because I thought I should, but none of the characters, including the Joans, actually engaged me. A bit flat.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-03-30 00:00:00 Gregory Bennett Joan Makes History is the 3rd book by Australian author, Kate Grenville. Joan Redman(Radulescu) is a minor character from Grenville’s first novel, Lilian’s Story. From an early age, Joan has been determined to make her mark in history, and as we follow her life as she loved and was bored, betrayed and was forgiven, ran away and returned, those chapters of her life alternate with chapters that reflect or echo events in her life, and in which Grenville takes historical facts and inserts her characters into her own interpretation of events. We see James Cook’s first sighting of the Great South Land as observed by his wife; the landing of the First Fleet through the eyes of a female convict; an encounter of Bass and Flinders through the eyes of an aboriginal girl; the hardships of taming the land, seeking gold, treatment of the blacks, war and rebellion, modes of travel, bushrangers, the late 19th century depression, and Federation, all through the eyes of women present at those events. There is humour and heartache; some chapters are quite thought-provoking, others are written very much tongue-in-cheek. Irreverent and imaginative.