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 […]
Tag: World History
In which I continue to use my blog as a personal notebook… A link to an outstanding article on and review of George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis. His fluency in German and Russian, as well as his knowledge of those countries’ histories and literary traditions, combined with a commanding, if […]
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, […]
Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard by Fan Shen (University of Nebraska, 294 pp.) From the University of Nebraska Press page: In 1966 twelve-year-old Fan Shen, a newly minted Red Guard, plunged happily into China’s Cultural Revolution. Disillusion soon followed, then turned to disgust and fear when Shen discovered that his compatriots had […]
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 […]