This World War II biography is written about Jan and Antonina Zabinksi. Jan was the Warsaw zoo’s zookeeper. Before the war, he and his wife lived in a villa at the zoo and enjoyed a home filled with strange and exotic pets, (besides the animals in the zoo, of course). It wasn’t unusual to see a hawk hopping throughout the house, or a baby lion being nursed. But what was once a beautifully strange and fulfilling way of life turned to a life of survival […]
omg
I completely adored Aslan’s last book, Zealot, which examined the historical evidence we have for what Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus, would have been like when you strip away all the modern beliefs and assumptions. It was incredibly fascinating and Aslan took us through the evidence piece by piece, drawing conclusions or best guesses along the way. Although I enjoyed God, it definitely wasn’t what I was expecting. I was expecting the same measured look at historical evidence and then conclusions drawn from that […]
Better Than Being There
The number one thing I learned from How To Be A Tudor, by charming and intelligent historian Ruth Goodman, is that I’m glad I’m not a Tudor.
How a scientist intent on helping feed his country starved in a gulag
This book made me quite upset. Nikolai Vavilov was a man whose name deserved greater recognition. As a botanist and geneticist in the early 20th century, he characterised the origins of domestic crops, put forward the law of homologous variation (for laypeople, this is where you expect to see similar mutations in related species), and stared the earliest seed banks. And he came to a tragic end when he ran afoul of Stalin and one of his pet cranks. Under Lenin, Vavilov had managed to […]
I Was the Wrong Audience for this Book
One of my colleagues asked me to read this book along with him to help him prepare a presentation for his religions and sociology course, and I wanted to like it, for his sake and my own, but I was hands-down the absolute worst audience for this book. This is a volume for someone who’s coming in with no prior knowledge, or knows a little bit about a lot of different religions. I unfortunately know an iceberg’s worth of information on my own religion, and […]
Fight the Power
This short (115 page) treatise comprises two lectures which noted Cambridge academic and classicist Mary Beard delivered in 2014 and 2017. In these lectures, “The Public Voice of Women” and “Women in Power,” Beard examines the classical roots of the silencing of women’s voices and its effect on women in the modern Western world. Ultimately, in considering how women might truly become “voices of authority,” Beard suggests a reconsideration of “power” itself. In the first essay, Beard takes the reader back 3,000 years to demonstrate […]
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