The post title is not a sequel to a John Candy movie (fortunately) but a recent release by the Yale University Press: The Invisible Harry Gold: The Man Who Gave the Soviets the Atom Bomb by Allen M. Hornblum. Even with the overstated title, this book caught my eye because of recent discussion about Solzhenitsyn’s In […]
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Map of St. Petersburg, 1893 Picture sourceI wasn’t sure what I would read next but after opening Andrei Bely’s Petersburg and reading the two-page prologue, I am hooked. So Petersburg it is. I am reading the Pushkin Press release, translation by John Elsworth. A quick internet search on the author and title shows more available […]
From Open Culture, “Internet Archive has opened up access to 74 banned books.” Click on over and download any favorites or books you have been wanting to read.
In the previous post I provided a summary from the back cover of Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical work. You can see a preview of the translation by Mirra Ginsburg at Google books. This was the perfect book I needed after finishing The Histories and I know I will return to it again—I loved it and highly […]
I started Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog this week and quickly fell in love with it. I also have a copy of the 1988 Russian movie that I hope to watch this weekend. For anyone not familiar with this short novel, it “tells the story of a scroungy Moscow mongrel named Sharik. Thanks to the […]
I may be obliged to tell what is said, but I am not at all obliged to believe it. And you may consider this statement to be valid for my entire work. – from Book Seven, Paragraph 152 Wow. That’s about all I can manage at this point. What a long strange trip this has […]
This post covers Book Nine from Paragraph 90 through the end of the work, covering the battle of Mycale, the siege of Sestos, and the final anecdotes. The Greeks had sailed to Delos under the command of the Spartan Leotychidas. Messengers from Samos urge the Greeks to travel to their island to attack the Persians […]
So here I am within sight of the finish line of this project I semi-unwittingly tackled and I’m slamming on the brakes to post about a topic I glossed over in Book Seven. For this post I wanted to look at the battle of Himera in Sicily that was supposed to have occurred on the […]
The Persians were not inferior in courage or strength, but they did not have hoplite arms, and besides, they were untrained and no match for their opponents in tactical skill. They were dashing out beyond the front lines individually or in groups of ten, joining together in larger or smaller bands, and charging right into […]
This map covers earlier battles, but it also provides the topography of the area surrounding Plataea (located just below the “oe” in Boeotia) Picture source After dinner, as they lingered drinking, the Persian on the couch with Thersandros asked him in Greek what country he came from, to which he replied, “Orchomenus.” The Persian then […]