Jenny Lawson, our beloved Bloggess, mentioned this book. It sounded really awesome, so I had to check it out. It’s a look at what life was like for a woman back in Victorian times. It has quotes from medical journals and books of the time, as well as illustrations, all with hilarious commentary. Basically, it was a dirty, dirty time, and having a uterus made you crazy sick, or just crazy, unless you filled it with your husband’s babies. There are chapters on grooming, diet, […]
The stars at night are big and bright deep in the heart of Texas!
When famed Texas historian T.R. Fehrenback died a few years ago, Texas Monthly eulogized the man and offered some early insight on his legacy and the book that made him famous – Lone Star: What makes Fehrenbach a great historian? The answer is that he is a great writer. He has a story to tell. Lone Star is indeed an epic. It is a work that covers not just chapters but centuries. On its pages we encounter generations of men who came to Texas to subdue […]
Impressive and ambitious
“How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it–not apart from it, but inside of it.” Homegoing (2016) is a far-reaching and impressive first novel by Yaa Gyasi. The book begins in the late 1700’s on the coast of Western Africa with two […]
A 200 year old forgotten war that inspired more thought than I’d expected.
This is a fairly difficult book for me to review, because I quite enjoyed it but have some serious complaints about not only its content, but the views of its author. The book itself is well researched, and the subject was interesting, being an area and an era with which I’m fairly unfamiliar. The time between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the antebellum years, has always been a bit out of reach for me. I can never really remember which president served at […]
What’s old is new again.
I spent a large portion of my teenage life aspiring to be an artist, and I surrounded myself with art books. Hell, my screen name (which I’ve used since the mid-90s) comes from a French Neoclassical artist. For all that, however, I mostly only read the books for the pictures – not the text. So while I’ve memorized every line in some of Ingres’ sketches, or Michelangelo’s sculptures, I can give only quick outlines of Leonardo, or Michaelangelo, or Delacroix, or any number of other […]
Fantastic Historical Fiction
Confession: I picked up this book not realizing it was volume 4 of a series. It still mostly made sense though, and I didn’t figure out it wasn’t book 1 until the end. It’s historical fiction, set in Victorian England, as Richard Francis Burton returns home from discovering the source of the Nile, but then it goes steampunk with time travel, spirits, vampires, etc. There’s a lot of real life historical people in this story, and thankfully there’s an appendix with the specifics at the […]
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