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 […]
Your Moment of Zen
I have watched The Daily Show from the beginning and only recently gave up on it. I loved it more some years than others and then gradually lost interest and stopped. That is also how my reading of this book went. I gave up with a few dozen pages left because the drain Jon Stewart was feeling really drains the fun from the last part of this book. But if you love the show and all the contributors than this is an interesting retelling of […]
Yes All Women
It’s been a long time since a book I’ve read doubled as a personal journal, but my copy of Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me is about as marked up as my high school copy of Emerson/Thoreau’s Nature/Walking. The book, a collection of essays about the individual and shared experiences of womanhood and issues of gender, power, and feminism, takes its name from the lead essay in which Solnit narrates an infuriating experience of an older gentleman oldwhitemansplaining one of her own books to […]
Divorced, beheaded and died; divorced, beheaded, survived
There would appear to have been two big dangers to the health of women in the 16th century. One of them was childbirth – if you didn’t die during, it was highly likely that you would do so in the immediate aftermath, mostly thanks to puerperal fever (a uterine infection caused by, shudder, tearing and a total ignorance of hygiene on the part of Tudor midwives – and the other was marrying Henry VIII. This is the story of the six unlucky ladies to have […]
So you’re saying the movie 300 might not have been historically accurate?
I picked up this book not knowing too much about it, except that it looked quirky with some fun artwork and promised to teach me math and physics in an entertaining way. I didn’t know that the author, Randall Munroe, is the cartoonist behind xkcd.com, the delightful webcomic where stick figures rule and sarcasm explains science. Munroe actually studied physics in school and was a roboticist at NASA before becoming a cartoonist full-time. On his site, and in this book, he combines his passion for science with his keen […]
An Unsung American Hero
This brief but riveting history was just released last month. Erica Armstrong Dunbar is a Professor of Black Studies and History at the University of Delaware and has previously published an historical work entitled A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City. In the course of doing research some two decades ago, Dunbar came across an advertisement in an issue of the Philadelphia Gazette in 1796 for the capture of President Washington’s runaway slave Ona Judge. Her curiosity piqued, Dunbar resolved […]
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