Reviews
Lee Miller: A Woman’s War
One thing I’ve missed over the last year has been “browsing with serendipity” in the library stacks.* My mother brought the phrase home from one of her library science classes a million years ago and it perfectly describes the feeling of finding a book that you didn’t know existed—and consequently didn’t know you needed—snuggled up…
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Weird History
Let me make it clear from the beginning that Desert Oracle is very different from the books I generally share with you here on the Margins. It is not a work of narrative history, but history is woven throughout it. Weird history, true, but history nonetheless. Desert Oracle is the outgrowth of a more-or-less quarterly…
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The Fabric of Civilization
Two sentences early in Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World caught my imagination: “What we usually call the Stone Age could just as easily be called the String Age. The two prehistoric technologies were literally intertwined.” I was predisposed to enjoy the book, which combines two of my favorite…
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