Category: Europe

December 14, 2014

Warburg in Rome by James Carroll *** (of 4)

I learned a lot about the plight of European Jews in the years 1944 to 1947. American Jews knew of the death camps, but widespread...

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November 26, 2014

Yiddishkeit by Harvey Pekar and Paul Buhle *** (of 4)

Even the title of the book isn’t really translatable, encompassing as it does more than a language. Yiddishkeit is a people, it’s culture, and an...

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October 28, 2014

Agent Zigzag by Ben McIntyre *** (of 4)

Prior to the outbreak of WWII, the British citizen Eddie Chapman spent his youth blowing safes and robbing banks. Passing in and out of jails, Chapman...

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September 26, 2014

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling *** (of 4)

The plot entails a battle in city council, in Britain called Parish Council, over whether the poorer neighborhood of Yarvil should be cut free from...

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September 9, 2014

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene ** (of 4)

Greene is supposed to be one of the great storytellers of our age, and this version read aloud by Colin Firth (pitter pat goes my...

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August 11, 2014

All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr **** (of 4)

Two parallel stories. In France, a teenage girl, blind since the age of five, has her life turned upside down when the Germans invade Paris....

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June 22, 2014

Talk to the Snail by Stephen Clarke *** (of 5)

It’s a standard genre. Expat, in this case British, lives in France long enough to write an irreverent, comic, snarky account of French mannerisms. He...

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May 5, 2014

Life after Life by Kate Atkinson **** (of 5)

On the first page, Ursala Todd has the opportunity to shoot Hitler in 1930 and does so. No wait. A few pages later Ursula is...

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April 25, 2014

Hitler’s Furies by Wendy Lower *** (of 4)

Contemporary research on Nazi war crimes suggests most Nazis were Ordinary Men. Neither crazed nor fanatical killers, Christopher Browning’s landmark book in 1992 discovered that most...

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March 19, 2014

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris *** (of 4)

Robert Harris makes his living fictionalizing famous historical events (see Pompeii). In this case, it is the end of the nineteenth century, and the French...

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