London, 1849, you are a doctor and the dreaded disease, Cholera, is literally hitting the city the like the Bubonic plague. Your neighbor was fighting fit on Monday, and Wednesday morning you watched him go out on the corpse cart. The epidemic will go on to take over 50,000 lives before petering out a few months later. But based on its track record, you know it will be back. What do you do? If you’re John Snow, anesthesiologist and part-time medical investigator, you march through […]
Shopping, Seduction and Mr. Selfridge
Shopping, Seduction & Mr. Selfridge has a very specific target audience: people who are interested in history, fashion and the retail business. I happen to be one of those people, I read the Stanley Marcus book Minding the Store for pleasure while I was a junior in college. I’d recommend Mr. Selfridge over Mr. Marcus if you enjoy a little scandal, because Mr. Selfridge was pretty scandalous. Fashion succeeds as a business precisely because its obsolescence is inevitable. Harry Gordon Selfridge was an American who […]
Ye Olde Booke Reuieuu
If my review title makes you want to howl and scream with the unparalleled, uncompromising rage of a true English-language pedant, then you are going to love this book. Hard. The full title is Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling, and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling, but reading it is a breeze. It is a book for the layperson, so even if you haven’t quite nailed that dissertation defense, you’ll be fine… Full review
A historical romance with double agents
I’m back! Did you miss me? I finally finished enough work to start catching up on my reviews. Brace yourselves for quite a few in the coming week. This is the fifth book in Joanna Bourne’s Spymasters series, but as the books are written out of chronological order historically speaking, and some overlap (for those who HAVE read the previous books in the series, there’s a really interesting blog post here explaining where the various books fit into the historical time line), it’s not actually that big […]
Breathtakingly Gorgeous
Quarter Cannonball! Do you like maps? Infographics? Data? London? Do you think Edward Tufte is a genius? Then do I have a book for you… I love maps. I think they are my favorite form of decoration. They are also fascinating to me – the idea that someone figured out and then drew to scale where every little bit of a place is. One of my favorite episodes of the West Wing involves a discussion of how maps can both show data and distort it, […]
A panegyric to the paterfamilias
I was too young to really follow the presidency of Ronald Reagan. I have vague memories of the Cold War, but it always felt like a distant and insubstantial thing. It wasn’t until Desert Storm that world events really started to register through the haze of childish indifference. So George H.W. Bush is indelibly connected, for good or ill, to the opening of my world and discovery of politics. While I can’t say I paid great attention to his administration, his was the first I […]
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