Okay… am I alone in not realizing that Kitty Hawk was in North Carolina? I guess I took the whole “two brothers from Ohio” thing to mean they achieved all their triumphs in Ohio which is supremely not the case. So most of us know the story of the Wright Brothers (even if we don’t all know the geography) and their breakthrough discoveries that led to modern airplanes. David McCullough delivers a well researched account of the boys’ journey to aviation glory without being too […]
All the Sudden People Were Dying Everywhere
Rating: 3.5/5 Summary: The Farming of Bones begins in 1937 in a village on the Dominican side of the river that separates the country from Haiti. Amabelle Desir, Haitian-born and a faithful maidservant to the Dominican family that took her in when she was orphaned, and her lover Sebastien, an itinerant sugarcane cutter, decide they will marry and return to Haiti at the end of the cane season. However, hostilities toward Haitian laborers find a vitriolic spokesman in the ultra-nationalist Generalissimo Trujillo who calls for an […]
Print the Legend
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” -The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Written forty years afterward, David Halberstam’s warm look back at the Yankees-Red Sox pennant race of 1949 is not for the sabrmetrically inclined. With its unchecked assertions and reliance on anecdotes, there are many parts of Halberstam’s narrative that are unlikely to survive statistical scrutiny. Can it really be true that Joe DiMaggio was never thrown out going from first to third once in his long career? Or that Boston’s Johnny […]
Didn’t quite live up to the hype, but a good read nonetheless
Emma Cline’s The Girls has appeared on every list of can’t-miss books that I’ve seen so far this year. It finally came out, and I snagged a digital copy from the library. It was definitely good, even though not quite as good as I expected. “Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get.” The Girls tells the story of Evie Boyd, now a driftless grown woman, who fell into a cult in the 1960s […]
“People had gone west leaving behind all sorts of trouble; what they found in California was the space and freedom to create new trouble.”
This booked exhausted me — I couldn’t stand the characters (I believe one of my status updates while reading it wished death upon the mother) and it was just horrible event after horrible event. I get that the 1830s were probably not the greatest time to be alive, but still! “Prying out a stump reminded him of how deeply a tree clung to the ground, how tenacious a hold it had on a place. Though he was not a sentimental man – he did not […]
Rebel with a cause
I’ve had this book sitting on my shelves since it came out in 2013 and I just got around to reading it. To be fair, when I bought it the first time, it wasn’t really because I was burning to read a book about the historical Jesus, it was more to do with the shitstorm of criticism Reza Aslan got from conservatives because he’s a Muslim daring to write a book about Jesus. Remember this? He was so well-spoken and intelligent that I ordered the […]
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