Reviews
One House, Five Families and 100 Years of German History
In The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History, Thomas Harding* tells the history of twentieth century Germany through the lens of a small vacation home, located on a lake near the outskirts of Berlin, and the five families who owned it. Harding is not an impartial…
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Brunelleschi’s Dome
The architecture book is done. While I was working on it, I wouldn’t have said it was fun. (My Own True Love will corroborate this.) I put in a lot of late nights. I struggled to find a simple way to describe how an arch works.* But along the way I re-read some old favorites,…
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Two Poets, Eight Centuries, One Poetic Masterpiece
Save Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is one of those books that some scholars love to be snotty about. Literary critics of a certain stamp dismiss it as bad poetry, apparently on the grounds that people love it who don’t otherwise read poetry.* Persian linguists rightly point out that Fitzgerald’s translation…
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