So my caveats are: This is pop history and all its trappings are possible and present within this. I don’t know almost anything about the Boer War going in so I can’t challenge anything. I listened to the audiobook, so any reference material used was not directly cited. But I found this very entertaining. It’s about Winston Churchill’s Boer War experiences first as a combatant and then as a war reporter who is captured and then escapes, and then spends a bunch of time […]
The Forgotten Children of London (And Cannonball!)
This is the 12th (!) Sebastian St. Cyr mystery, which means I have come to the end of the published books. I have really enjoyed the entire series, and Ms Harris has done an excellent job of keeping the storylines interesting. Coming to the end of this is probably not a bad thing with the warmer weather and my lack of free time to read as much as before. It also coincides with my 52nd book and reaching Cannonball! Over the course of three years […]
Pirates and Kissing
This was such a nice surprise. I expected a raunchy romance with a little bit of pirate stuff thrown in, but this is a proper adventure with sea battles, spies, and a lot of sailing talk, while still focusing on the characters. Kit has been struggling to fix his career with the British Navy after a disastrous voyage has tainted his reputation. He forced to accept a position as a valet just to get back out on the water. His bad luck holds when his […]
Two books so close as to be indistinguishable
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide; and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness by Carol Anderson and Michelle Alexander
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell […]
An Unreliable Narrator Escapes to Freedom
“High School students in America debate why President Roosevelt didn’t bomb the rail lines to Hitler’s camps. Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il’s camps, and did nothing.” Escape from Camp 14 is the story of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only known person to be born in a North Korean work camp and successfully escape. Shin’s mother and father were both prisoners in Camp 14 for crimes committed long before Shin was born; Shin […]
I was misinformed, then I was wrong, and now I’m at a loss over a 20 year old tragedy
Columbine by Dave Cullen
I started this review on April 15th with the line, “I don’t like the style of this book.” Which was true at the time, and ultimately led me to abandon reading it until a couple weeks ago. One of my favorite podcast discoveries this year has been one called Martyrmade. It’s a history podcast in the style of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, heavily detailed with long episodes. The man who makes Martyrmade, Darryl Cooper, has another podcast (which I do not recommend, by the way), […]
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