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jenn756 's review for:
The Riddle of the Sands
by Erskine Childers
Childers was undoubtedly a good sailor and if you like sailing this novel is for you. Its full of mysterious terminology like `mizzen' and `gunwhale' and a good deal of talk about various winds, like `sou-westers' not to speak of the sand and channels. An awful lot of sand. I know nothing whatsoever about boats, except that they float on water and probably want to keep it that way really. Although there are some lovely descriptions of the North German coastline.
It is a boys-own type spying story written in the early 1900s, very masculine (Childers is hopeless with romance, he may as well not have bothered.) It capitalises on the unease building in Europe between the major nations, and the paranoia that Germany was imminently overtaking Britain militarily. As I understand it Germany had no invasion plans at all in the early 1900s and so this book was feeding the military jingoism of the time, perhaps dangerously considering the eventual drift towards war (although it showed the security weaknesses on the British coastline.) If you highlight something often enough people start accepting it as fact, and so if people were told Germans were evil and trecherous often enough they believed in it.
The hero, Carruthers , sets out for a boating holiday with his old friend, Davies (we never learn his first name) around the sandy estuaries of Northern Germany and he gets more than he bargained for.
A note about the Kindle version - the book is much easier to understand if you can follow the maps provided at the end of the book, but the reproductions on the kindle are so poor to be undecipherable, so best read in the paper version.
It is a boys-own type spying story written in the early 1900s, very masculine (Childers is hopeless with romance, he may as well not have bothered.) It capitalises on the unease building in Europe between the major nations, and the paranoia that Germany was imminently overtaking Britain militarily. As I understand it Germany had no invasion plans at all in the early 1900s and so this book was feeding the military jingoism of the time, perhaps dangerously considering the eventual drift towards war (although it showed the security weaknesses on the British coastline.) If you highlight something often enough people start accepting it as fact, and so if people were told Germans were evil and trecherous often enough they believed in it.
The hero, Carruthers , sets out for a boating holiday with his old friend, Davies (we never learn his first name) around the sandy estuaries of Northern Germany and he gets more than he bargained for.
A note about the Kindle version - the book is much easier to understand if you can follow the maps provided at the end of the book, but the reproductions on the kindle are so poor to be undecipherable, so best read in the paper version.