A Calamity of Souls by David Baldacci is a heart-wrenching and tension-filled read of racial prejudice that reminded me of both of the classic American novel To Kill a Mockingbird and Nancy Hartney’s The Blue Bottle Tree. In all three, the emotion levels run high and keep a reader enthralled.
I offer a different type of book review here—one that’s combined with vocabulary building or sometimes just a fun look at words. For Baldacci’s novel, I chose a legal term I hadn’t heard previously but played heavily in the novel.
From A Calamity of Souls:
“This is absurd!” barked Sam Randolph. “Why would my parents have created this…this tontine device? It makes no sense at all.”
tontine, noun: an annuity shared by subscribers to a loan or common fund, the shares increasing as subscribers die until the last survivor enjoys the whole income. Also, a life insurance plan in which the beneficiaries are those who survive and maintain a policy to the end of a given period.
Origin: mid-18th century: from French, named after Lorenzo Tonti (1630-95), a Neapolitan banker who started such a scheme to raise government loans in France (c.1653).
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Check out David Baldacci at https://www.davidbaldacci.com/
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Definitions are typically from the dictionary that comes with my Mac or The New Oxford American Dictionary.
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What interesting words have you discovered in your recent reading?
“The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God’s name would you want to make things worse by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use?” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.