Category: History

August 13, 2012

1493 by Charles Mann *** (of 4)

Prior to Columbus’s blundering into the Caribbean, there was negligible interchange of plants, animals, or humans between continents. Shortly thereafter the onset of large-scale globalization...

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June 17, 2012

Churchill by Paul Johnson ** (of 4)

An interesting approach to a biography of the man who saved western civilization from Hitler. Churchill wrote more than 10 million words in his lifetime,...

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May 21, 2012

Hitch 22 by Christopher Hitchens **** (of 4)

A memoir of Hitchen’s 60 years on earth most of it he spent as an irrascible, cantankerous, and largely contrarian thinker, writer, and agitator. As...

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May 15, 2012

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson *** (of 4)

William E. Dodd, an unassuming, dysthymic, history professor at the University of Chicago finds himself America’s ambassador to Berlin in 1933. President Roosevelt is battling...

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April 24, 2012

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka **** (of 4)

An elegy for the Japanese women who arrived in California in the early part of the twentieth century as mail-order brides to join lonely Japanese laborers. ...

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April 1, 2012

March by Geraldine Brooks *** (of 4)

Mr. March, in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, heads south to fight the Confederacy at the opening of Alcott’s novel and returns on Christmas a...

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March 19, 2012

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell *** (of 4)

High marks for originality. The year is 1799, though it feels like the period is 150 years earlier than that, and the location is just...

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March 1, 2012

Haiti: The Aftershocks of History by Laurent Dubois ** (of 4)

This book covers Haiti’s history from the first importation of enslaved Africans to the months immediately following the devastating 2010 earthquake. It is as thorough...

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February 22, 2012

Lost to the West by Lars Bronworth *** (of 5)

OK, I did not know a thing about the Byzantine empire before I read this book and now not only do I have a sense...

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February 5, 2012

The Long Song by Andrea Levy **** (of 4)

This is the story of Miss July a house slave in Jamaica from her birth in the cane fields to her post-slavery restitution living in...

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