3.5 stars. The premise of My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me is hard to resist. Though adopted as a child, Jennifer Teege had some contact with her biological mother and grandmother. As a young adult, she spent time in Israel, learning their language, making friends with the people, and even volunteering with Holocaust victims who wanted to speak German again. Imagine her surprise when she browsed a library later in life and saw her biological mother in a book about Amon Goeth, the notoriously vicious […]
“In conclusion, women are just awful, and periods prove it.”
I wouldn’t have known about Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage and Manners if it hadn’t been for the reviews on this site, so a BIG thank you to all of the Cannonballers whose reviews placed it firmly on my radar, leading to much cackling and interruptions of my footie-watching boyfriend with a ‘Listen to this…’. Tackling all of the daily realities of Victorian ladies – an era that we’re visiting as relatively wealthy, European women so as to ensure things stay on […]
Shark Repellent Was Designed to Act as a Placebo
The past few years I have been working slowly but surely through the works of Mary Roach. I find her style to be intoxicating, even if her subjects seem a little outside my own personal interests. When announced that her latest book would be about the science of war I was immediately wondering how her light-hearted and comedy heavy style would work with this subject. Once I realized that she was, as usual, going to focus on the weird eddies of science and discovery. In […]
The Ten Dollar Founding Father
I’m not a great reader of biographies or even non-fiction. However, after learning so much about Alexander Hamilton through the musical, I decided to take a deep dive into the actual history of Hamilton’s life. I expected this biography would be interesting and informative, but I did not anticipate how moving and readable Chernow’s book would be. This book with 731 pages was practically a page turner. I’m a fan of pared down writing with no unnecessary diversions. If you read through my past reviews […]
The history of American spooks
3.5 stars. Learning about history via a tour of the most haunted places in America is not something I knew I wanted until I heard Liberty Hardy talking up Ghostland on a Book Riot podcast. Once I knew it existed, I had to get my hands on it. Colin Dickey travels the country learning more about the ghosts of America’s history. The ghosts take both him and the reader to some very random places and histories. From a house hunt in Los Angeles to “the […]
They Didn’t Want to Leave, They Definitely Couldn’t Stay
“I was leaving the South/To fling myself into the unknown…./I was taking a part of the South/To transplant in alien soil,/To see if it could grow differently,/If it could drink of new and cool rains,/Bend in strange winds,/Respond to the warmth of other suns/And, perhaps, to bloom.” – Richard Wright
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