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Reports from Britain and America
For over two decades, Andrew O'Hagan has been publishing critical essays in celebrated periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic - among them The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and other publications. The Atlantic Ocean highlights the best of his clear-eyed, brilliant work, beginning with an essay tracing the "special relationship" between Britain and America since the days of Margaret Thatcher and ending with an extraordinary piece about the lives, and deaths, of Guardsman Anthony Wakefield and US Marine Corporal Lieutenant Colonel John C. Spahr, who both died in Iraq on May 2, 2005. O'Hagan's subjects range from the rise of the tabloids to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, to the trajectory of the Beatles and the impossibility of not fancying Marilyn Monroe.
The Atlantic Ocean is a fascinating, important, and timely collection.
"Starred Review. A brilliant essayist, [O'Hagan] constructs sentences that pierce like pinpricks." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Stupendously unflinching, bursting with possibility" - Booklist
"A mixed bag with some very good lines (if often spoken by others) jumbled up with some rather stale ephemera." - Kirkus
"...at his most impressive, O'Hagan demonstrates that fiction can compel us to redefine reality, as when hurricane Katrina, tossing hotels and casinos through the air and wrapping chandeliers in Spanish moss, transforms the grotesque fantasies of Southern Gothic into 'a form of social realism'. Lies dribble from the slack mouths of politicians; if we want to know the truth about the false world we live in, we need to consult the writers of fiction." - The Guardian
This information about The Atlantic Ocean was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Jerry Bauer
Andrew O'Hagan, a Scottish novelist and essayist, is a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, a three-time nominee for the Booker Prize, the editor-at-large of the London Review of Books, and a contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in London.
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