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My great friend Emre recently experienced some misfortunes, but he has been doing a lot of reading which is keeping his spirits high. Here is what he wrote me:Another thing aside form your wedding that helped lift my spirits after the debacle was William Boyd's An Ice-Cream War. I'm not sure if you're familiar with his writing, but that was the first I read by him and it blew me away. So, I was back at Barnes and Noble this week to pick up his Stars and Bars which sounds very promising as well. Nevertheless, back to An Ice-Cream War. It is the story of various characters in England, the British East Africa and German East Africa, starting in the summer of 1914 when talk of an Anglo-German war seemed ridiculous and ending with the surrender of the squareheads as the Britons in the novel call them kind of peoples. The satirical approach is akin to Catch 22, a terrible comparison, I am aware, as it is hard to beat Catch-22, but nevertheless unique in its tone and weaving of characters. Yossarian's cowardly rationalization of the stupidity of war might be unparalleled, but Boyd's snotty British approach makes you laugh out loud at the most obscene death. It's not because of the circumstances, but because of the silliness that surrounds all the characters and the world involved in a war about which few had an idea why it started and dragged on for so long and did not realize for a while that it had ended. Man, I can't rant about Boyd's An Ice-Cream War enough. In the opinion of a sweet lady that runs Biography Books, two blocks down from us, Boyd is one of the most under-rated contemporary authors. I don't know much about the ratings, but he sure is a phenomenal story-teller, and certainly is interested in historic events and contexts, which I dig. I'm currently recommending the book to everyone as a terrific summer read that you'll blast through in under a week.Thanks Emre! Sounds pretty good. I'll have to check it out.