Let’s get this out of the way: I really, really love London. I duly loathe the London Eye, I have my favourite Camden Lock stands and I feel a shiver of excitement whenever I smell the tube’s musk. Other tourists ask me for directions. As soon as I win the lottery – which is only a matter of time, really – I’m moving there. Until then I’m content to take my students there every year (twice, sometimes) and when I show them around, I love […]
John Snow Knows How to Save the World
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 […]
If Serial Was Set in Victorian England
“The ordinary was made sinister.” Any Serial obsessed person can tell you that line pretty much sums up the whole podcast. It also accurately sums up the murder of three year old Saville Kent in England in 1860 at Road House. The residents and staff of Road House all had alibis that, if you believed them innocent, appeared innocuous. If you perceived them guilty, their testimony seems suspect. For example, when the governess awoke at 5am and noticed the three year old missing from bed, […]
The Phantom Menace of Presidential Memoirs
I think I did a good job while reading George W. Bush’s Decision Points in differentiating the man from his presidency. I was able to judge the book not by the character of its author, but by the character of its content, and I came away with an appreciation for the man that I had never had before. So I was interested to see how Bill Clinton’s voluminous memoir would impact my perceptions of the man and his presidency. A man, incidentally, whose accomplishments I […]
For the Love of Food!
I’d like to start out by saying first and foremost, I love food. Not the cooking of it; just the eating. If the food comes to me mouth-ready, I will eat just about anything. Until I read this book….one of Lovegren’s best qualities is really driving home the “gourmet” atrocities committed throughout most of the 20th Century. Seriously….someone in the 1920s thought combining peas, pickles, peanuts, and mayonnaise served in a piece of iceburg lettuce was the height of domestic sophistication. Oh and also presenting […]
Way More Bad Ass Than Rosie the Riveter
Don’t let the title fool you, it’s about the only titillating thing you’ll read in this book. I know that sounds like a slam on the book, but with a title like that, I was expecting the text to be a bit more reader accessible. I really can’t recommend this one unless you already have a good foundation of WWII history, especially the British intelligence front during the war. Between myriad acronyms and an intense expectation of European geography, it is not a book to […]
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