October 2012

Mankind: The Story of All of Us

October 31, 2012

I hope you will indulge me in a bit of blatant self-promotion. The book I spent much of this last year writing, agonizing over, and swearing about is finally out and I’m pleased as punch. In fact, I don’t much like punch so I’m pleased as a good bourbon at the end of a long [...]

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Road Trip Through History: Dover

October 30, 2012

Image courtesy of Webzoloo via Creative Commons Dover is the reason My Own True Love and I headed to England. I had questions related to one of my personal writing projects that could only be answered on the ground. We weren’t expecting much. The guidebooks all say something along the lines of “this workaday town [...]

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A Dance Through Time

October 25, 2012

Those of you who know me In Real Life know that I’m as passionate about dance as I am about history and that I never met an art museum I didn’t like. So it’s not surprising that I was quick to say “me, me” when Shelf Awareness was looking for a reviewer for  a quirky [...]

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Road Trip Through History: Canterbury*

October 23, 2012

My Own True Love and I began our two weeks in England with a pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. We did not find a bawdy Wife of Bath**, but there were plenty of tales. The most famous Canterbury tale is the murder of Thomas Beckett, archbishop of Canterbury. Beckett was a hard partying buddy of King [...]

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Blog Love

October 16, 2012

I’ll warn you ahead of time: today’s post is going to be a little different than my normal posts. Instead of blogging about history, I’m going to blog about history bloggers. If your eyes are beginning to glaze over, you can leave now and my feelings won’t be hurt. But you’re going to miss out [...]

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From The Ruins of Empire

October 11, 2012

If you’ve been following along for a while, you’ve probably figured out that I like books that look at familiar history from another point of view. (For example, here, and here, and here.) It should be no surprise that Pankaj Mishra’s latest book caught my eye. In From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who [...]

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Ibn Who?

October 9, 2012

If you spend any time studying history in a serious way–whether in school and/or as a dedicated history nerd–you end up with a list in your head of Great Historians of the Past: Herodotus*, Thucydides, Tacitus, the Venerable Bede, Gibbon, Macaulay, Prescott. Even after their historical works were revised or even rejected by later scholars**, [...]

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