The Sleepwalkers is one of the most thorough books I have recently read. It attempts to describe and make sense of the factors that led to WWI. The author attempts to discover the real causes beyond the notion that the war was inevitable. It’s a nearly impossible task that I think Christopher Clark does quite well. His findings do not provide a clear or simple answer but it is comprehensive and much better than the tired tropes we learned about in high school history class. […]
“What happens when you are worthless in somebody’s eyes”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah was one of my favorite reads last year, and her Purple Hibiscus will be right up there on this year’s list, too. I don’t know how it took so long for me to find her books (correction: yes, I do), but she has quickly become one of my favorite writers. Purple Hibiscus tells the story of the Achike family through the eyes of Kambili, a young girl. Papa rules the family with an iron grip, infantilizing and militarizing and terrorizing his […]
Saving their story from obscurity
3.5 stars. I’ve heard so much about Bletchley Park code breakers and the Native American code talkers, that it somehow never even occurred to me that there were tons of Americans actively engaged in breaking both German and Japanese codes during World War II. Like the women at Bletchley Park, the American code women were sworn to secrecy about their work and it’s only now that their work is coming to light. Liza Mundy spent an incredible amount of time and effort tracking down women […]
Lizzie Borden took an axe?
4.5 stars. I’d been eyeing this fictionalized account of the Lizzie Borden story for a while so when it was long-listed for the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction, I snagged a copy from my library. After reading it, it’s easy to see why it was longlisted. Schmidt is not fucking around with her prose. See What I Have Done is an incredible piece of writing, especially considering that it’s Schmidt’s debut. This is definitely a work of fiction, but there are huge overlaps with actual […]
“These are the frail, imperfect ways of ordinary human beings in the teeth of a great epidemic”
I finished reading this book a week ago today, and I’m still not sure how to write about it. I found it deeply moving, but it may still be too soon to put my thoughts and feelings into words, and anything I write here can only scratch the surface. Jonny Steinberg has packed so much into the 326 pages of Three-Letter Plague (published in the U.S. under the title Sizwe’s Test). He writes about his own literal and figurative journey to try to learn how […]
Never Give Up!
Longitude is one of the greatest kinds of books – the kind that makes the reader passionate about something I’ve never heard of or previously had an interest in. Not only that, this entertaining non-fiction gem taught me a few major life lessons. The book, as the title implies, is about longitude. Specifically, it is about how the world tried to figure out where in the world they were sailing, literally. Solutions ranged from the practical (reading the stars) to the mystical (using the pain […]
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