reviews

The Year Without Summer: “Eighteen hundred and froze to death”

March 11, 2013

Historian William K. Klingaman and meteorologist Nicholas P. Klingaman combine forces in The Year Without Summer: 1816 And The Volcano That Darkened The World And Changed History. Working in a vein similar to Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, the Klingamans weave together modern scientific explanations, nineteenth-century scientific (and religious) speculations, and historical events into a [...]

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The Birth of the West

March 5, 2013

Several weeks ago I mentioned a Big Fat History Book that had me gasping at my own ignorance. I left you dangling, but now that the review has appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers, I can share the details with you. The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in [...]

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The Making of the First World War: A Pivotal History

January 24, 2013

  Despite its title, The Making of the First World War: A Pivotal History by historian Ian F. W. Beckett is not another account of the events leading up to World War One.  Instead Beckett is concerned with what he describes as “pivot points”: decisive moments that affected not only the course of the war [...]

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On The Map

January 15, 2013

Speaking of maps, as I believe we were, I recently spent several happy days with a book that straddles the intersection between cartography and history. Simon Garfield, author of the bestselling Just My Type, once again takes a subject that seems the province of a small group of enthusiasts and opens it for a larger [...]

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Home Front Girl

December 27, 2012

A couple of weekends ago–in between baking ham, slicing sweet potatoes, chopping cranberries and rolling out biscuit dough– I gave myself the treat of reading Home Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature and Growing Up in Wartime America. And a treat it was. Born in 1922, Joan Wehlen, later Joan Wehlen Morrison, grew up [...]

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La Folie Baudelaire

November 15, 2012

In La Folie Baudelaire Roberto Calasso describes the life, work, and world of symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire in terms of an image borrowed from nineteenth century French critic Charles Saint-Beuve: the “highly decorated, highly tormented but graceful” architectural extravagance known as a garden folly. Saint-Beuve used the image to disparage Baudelaire’s work.  In Calasso’s hands [...]

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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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Adventures with John Buchan

September 27, 2012

Yesterday I decided not to finish a novel by one of my all time favorite authors, John Buchan. It was a hard choice to make. Most of you have probably never heard of Buchan, unless you’re given to reading popular fiction from the first half of the twentieth century. He wrote biographies, adventure novels, historical [...]

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Sita Sings the Blues

September 25, 2012

The Ramayana is one of the classic Indian epics. Ascribed to the great Sanskrit poet-sage, Valmiki, it’s a love story, a moral lesson, and/or a foundation myth, depending on what kind of reader you are. Boy gets girl. Boy loses girl to demon king. Boy rescues girl with the help of monkey-god. Boy worries that [...]

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C. W. Ceram and Me

September 11, 2012

One of my favorite books as a child was C. W. Ceram’s Gods, Graves, and Scholars: The Story of Archaeology.* I checked it out from the Springfield public library over and over. It was one of the first books I bought with my own money.** I still have it and dip into it on occasion [...]

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