This is the third outing for Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, and it’s quite a bit more gruesome than the last two. Someone is murdering and mutilating young men, leaving their bodies to be found at dawn with strange objects in their mouths. Sir Henry Lovejoy, Chief Magistrate, has asked Devlin to help out with the case since Devlin’s keen intellect and attention to detail served well on two other occasions to solve the crime. At first, Devlin is hesitant to get involved – he […]
Hidden Figures
Hidden Figures details the lives of the African American women who were the computers for NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which later became NASA. Before reading this, I assumed that these women were relatively young and fresh out of college without families of there own, but I quickly learned that this was not true. One of the first women we meet is married with children of her own. She’s a teacher (as some of the other women are) and took extra jobs to […]
Dead in the Regent’s Arms
What happens when your god dies? Sebastian wondered. When someone is your sun and moon and stars, and then you discover something, something that reveals a hitherto unknown weakness so fundamental, so shattering that it destroys not only your trust in the other person, but your respect, too. The second book in the St. Cyr series begins with a beautiful young wife of a marquess found partially dressed…and dead in the arms of the Prince Regent during a party at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. […]
Shut up; I’m not crying, you’re crying!
Oh man, this book. Erik Larson is a master of creative non-fiction, and I thoroughly enjoyed his previous books Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts, even if I found the former overly populist and the latter dry. He manages to navigate the two extremes well in general, and they are exceptionally well balanced in this book. His skill is here, as always, finding the personal in the impersonal, bringing a richness to stories time has reduced to facts and […]
Back at sea with my imaginary BFF’s
Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series is one of my favourites of all time. Despite initially not having much of a clue what the many, different sailing terms meant, somewhere in the first instalment I fell hook, line and sinker for the characters – particularly for the delightfully grumpy Stephen Maturin – and since then, whenever times have got tough and I need a pick-me-up, I treat myself to a little holiday in their company. As O’Brian is deceased and the series numbers twenty books, I’ve been […]
I like a good sober history book…
And it’s got a pun in the title! A not very funny pun. Hrm, a slavery pun does feel a little gross. Anyway, this was a finalist for the Pulitizer this year and so my local library picked up a copy and put it on Overdrive. It was a relatively short listen (read) and offers a sober, straight-forward assessment of New England colonies’ role in the slave trade. One of my favorite books ever is Changes in the Land by William Cronin, which details the New […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 522
- 523
- 524
- 525
- 526
- …
- 677
- Next Page »