Words From Vaish

Norse Mythology Neil Gaiman Bloomsbury 2017                                                                  279 Pages The old Norse religion is now well-nigh extinct in its native Germany and Scandinavia; being displaced by Lutheran Christianity. The associated  mythology lives on, though, in folktales, Wagnerian opera – and, of all things, American comics from the house of Marvel that also gave us such demi-gods as Spider-Man and Captain America. That’s how celebrated author Neil Gaiman ( American Gods , Anansi Boys ) first encountered Norse myth as a 7-year-old, in the pages of comic-book maestro Stan Lee’s The Mighty Thor . As drawn by artis...

The Honest Spy Andreas Kollender Translated by Steve Anderson Amazon Crossing 2017                                                     353 Pages Not all Germans were Nazis... Like the Schindler famous for a celebrated list that salvaged a cross-section of a doomed race during the dark years of the holocaust, Fritz Kolbe detested Nazi ideology and despised party hacks, besides hating Germany’s Fuhrer with a passion that ran dark and deep.  Unlike the playboy-profiteer Schindler, the more principled Herr Kolbe was an insider, being a senior civil servant in the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin. After a promising early career with pre-war diplomatic postings in Spain and South Africa, his continuing refusal to join the Nazi Party saw him ignominiously recalled to Germany and given the lowly job of stamping visas and ...