Take a photo of a barcode or cover
halfmanhalfbook 's review for:
A Brief History of Seven Killings
by Marlon James
Josey Wales is an ambitious gang leader with plans to take over the world. He is prepared to do anything to achieve this including taking over a rival gangs area and assassinating ‘The Singer’ a well known reggae superstar who is hoping to bring peace to his shattered country. The attempt fails, but Wales does manage to shatter the peace plans.
In this seventies Jamaica nothing is straightforward; the politicians are crooks, the gangs are made up of evil thoughtless killers, and the CIA is involved in meddling in the affairs of the country, supposedly to stop a communist takeover from Cuba. But mostly being ineffective. As Wales climbs the greasy pole, he gets into the drug trade and it makes him rich, very rich. So America beckons but he may yet be betrayed by the only thing that he cannot control; his temper.
This is a fictional account of the real events that took place in Jamaica in the 1970’s. ‘The Singer’, Bob Marley did survive an assassination attempt as he was preparing for a peace concert, and the gangs warfare was egged on by the political parties, spiralling out of control and ending up with a country where 600 murders happened in six months. James has tried to pull all this together to give us a story and it makes for grim unpalatable reading quite a lot of the time. Naturally he has got the patois off to a tee, and there is a storyline in there somewhere. It is full of pretty graphic violence between all the key characters and those unfortunate enough to come in range, with the CIA trying and failing to get a grip on the situation. Overall I didn’t feel that I got this book; I think that it was way too long and quite frequently felt tedious. If it was half the length it might have helped. There is a mass of characters in the book, some fairly distinct but a lot of the others seemed to blur into one mass of nastiness. Almost gave up, and almost gave it one star…
In this seventies Jamaica nothing is straightforward; the politicians are crooks, the gangs are made up of evil thoughtless killers, and the CIA is involved in meddling in the affairs of the country, supposedly to stop a communist takeover from Cuba. But mostly being ineffective. As Wales climbs the greasy pole, he gets into the drug trade and it makes him rich, very rich. So America beckons but he may yet be betrayed by the only thing that he cannot control; his temper.
This is a fictional account of the real events that took place in Jamaica in the 1970’s. ‘The Singer’, Bob Marley did survive an assassination attempt as he was preparing for a peace concert, and the gangs warfare was egged on by the political parties, spiralling out of control and ending up with a country where 600 murders happened in six months. James has tried to pull all this together to give us a story and it makes for grim unpalatable reading quite a lot of the time. Naturally he has got the patois off to a tee, and there is a storyline in there somewhere. It is full of pretty graphic violence between all the key characters and those unfortunate enough to come in range, with the CIA trying and failing to get a grip on the situation. Overall I didn’t feel that I got this book; I think that it was way too long and quite frequently felt tedious. If it was half the length it might have helped. There is a mass of characters in the book, some fairly distinct but a lot of the others seemed to blur into one mass of nastiness. Almost gave up, and almost gave it one star…