I’ve read a few books by Ryszard Kapuściński and thoroughly enjoyed them. He was a marvelous raconteur. The one book of his I posted about was Travels with Herodotus, a half-memoir and half-reflection on Herodotus’ The Histories. Reading it just after re-reading The Histories was perfect timing, amplifying my pleasure of it. The liberties Kapuściński […]
Tag: Nonfiction
Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon: Tales of a Soviet Scientist by Iosif Shklovsky Translated and adapted by Mary Fleming Zirin and Harold Zirin Introduction by Herbert Friedman W. W. Norton & Company: 1991 ISBN: 0-393-02990-5I don’t post on all the nonfiction I read but I enjoy passing on some of the offbeat books […]
Bluegrass Bluesman by Josh Graves Edited by Fred Bartenstein, Forward by Neil Rosenberg University of Illinois Press, 2012 (176 pages, paperback) ISBN: 978-0-252-07864-4If you would like an alternative to the rock autobiographies piling up lately I’ve got a recommendation. Josh Graves (1927–2006), the legendary Dobro player, gave several interviews over the last ten to fifteen […]
My last post while I’m taking a break… An article by David Mikics, “The Diplomat of Shoah History,” fits in well with much of my recent reading and I highly recommend it (even with some reservations). In the article Mikics looks at Timoth Snyder’s book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin and the question “Does […]
I skipped the release of 2010’s Robin Hood (with Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett), but had it on as background noise recently. When I heard the following lines, though, I became more interested…well, for a few minutes anyway. Rarely does a version of Robin Hood portray Richard Coeur-de-Lion in this light: King Richard The Lionheart: […]
While I’m waiting for a replacement copy of The Faithful River by Stefan Żeromski (the last 25 pages were missing), I think I’ll post my scattered notes on another book I’m reading: A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age by Steven Nadler. When I become interested enough […]
I wanted to make a short post after listening to the audiobook version of Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England by Thomas Penn. Highly recommended. OK, maybe I should add a little bit to that… I knew very little about Henry VII before listening to the book, which probably reflects his position between the […]
The Physics of NASCAR: How to Make Steel + Gas + Rubber = Speed by Diandra Leslie-Pelecky Foreword by Ray EvernhamA few Saturdays ago I was sitting in the library while my boys were deciding on which books to check out when I saw this book in a science display. After leafing through a few […]
Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire by James Romm Knopf, 341 pp., $28.95 This book covers in gripping detail the events that began on June 1, 323 B.C., when Alexander the Great became ill with what would be a fatal fever, and ended seven […]
Thanks to rogueclassicism for the following links, both of which cover some of the history of Carthage and one to Richard Miles’ Carthage Must be Destroyed. Richard Miles’ was on ABC Radio National’s program By Design discussing Carthage – and where is it now? (link is dead; broadcast not currently available). A wide ranging discussion, […]
I throw this out for anyone that was interested in Bloodlands since this book focuses on some of the same area but expands the history. Because of the price, I probably won’t be buying it any time soon but I’ll definitely look for this in nearby libraries. From the description at the Oxford University Press: […]
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin Basic Books, Hardcover, 544 pages ISBN-10: 9780465002399 / ISBN-13: 978-0465002399 Each of the dead became a number. Between them, the Nazi and Stalinist regimes murdered more than fourteen million people in the bloodlands. The killing began with a political famine that Stalin directed at Soviet Ukraine, which […]
More quotes from Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. Chapter 10 (“Ethnic Cleansings”) and Chapter 11 (“Stalinist Anti-Semitism”) look at Stalin’s actions post-World War II and how they impacted the “bloodlands.” With the relocations of ethnic populations, Stalin moved millions of people in order to create the client states he wanted. At […]
More quotes from Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. Chapter 9 (“Resistance and Incineration”) looks at Jewish resistance, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April/May 1943), the destruction of that ghetto and the construction of a concentration camp on the same spot, the Warsaw Uprising (August/September 1944), and the destruction of Warsaw just before […]
More quotes from Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. Chapter 8 (“The Nazi Death Factories”) focuses on the evolution and operation of the death factories run by the German regime. While some facilities exploited those Jews healthy enough to work, others were solely intended to kill. As Snyder shrewdly put it, “Belźec […]
NOTE: This entry no longer updated. See my Works Covered page for a list of all books reviewed on this blog. Since I spend a lot of time with nonfiction and initially I did not make any comments on these books I wanted to have one page that provided an easy round-up for me to […]
More quotes from Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. Chapter 6 (“Final Solution”) and Chapter 7 (“Holocaust and Revenge”) continue the look at the evolution of the “Jewish problem” and confrontations between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, particularly in Belarus (where half the pre-war population had been killed or moved by […]
More quotes from Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. Chapter 5, titled “The Economics of Apocalypse”, looks at the plans and operations of Germany’s attack of the Soviet Union, focusing on the planned deaths of the Soviets through starvation. While the grand scale of the “Hunger Plan” was not faithfully carried out […]
More quotes from Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. Most of Chapter 4 focuses on the carving up of Poland by Hitler and Stalin. One aspect briefly touched on in this chapter that I wanted to highlight involves the deliberate elimination of Polish intellectuals by both Germany and the USSR. The removal […]
More quotes from Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. Chapter 3 looks at the expansion of the Great Terror from class persecution to national lines: People belonging to national minorities “should be forced to their knees and shot like mad dogs.” It was not an SS officer speaking but a communist party […]