Finished Paul Laurence Dunbar: A Poet to Remember, by Patricia C. McKissack. It was interesting. I hadn’t known that he was friends with Orville Wright. The Wright brothers owned a print shop before they sold bikes, and printed some of his early work.
Also, he sent a letter to a writer he admired when he worked for a magazine. When she wrote back, she explained the delay–she had just picked up his letter when she discovered her house was on fire! Putting out the small blaze distracted her from replying.
Now I’m reading The World Jones Made, by Philip K. Dick.
Finished The World Jones Made, by Philip K. Dick. Not bad. One thing that I especially noticed was how often he mentioned the prices. It was written in the late 1950’s and takes place in the early 2000’s, and he often says how much a character pays for things. I think its supposed to be shocking, but $50 for a (more or less) cover charge in a nightclub sounds reasonable. And $90 for a longish taxi ride? Yeah, that works. Also, one young woman has the first name “Tyler”, which I think he considered exotic. Now, not so much.
Now I’m reading The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture, Disabilities, and Other Reasons to Fall in Love with Me, by Keah Brown.
Rereading Woodward and Bernstein The Final Days—Nixon unraveling as the impeachment investigation draws closer. Similar in some ways to what’s happening today, very different in others!
Last night I finished American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race by Douglas Brinkley, which is almost a joint bio of JFK and Von Braun. Pretty good, fine scholarship from what I could tell, but sometimes ploddingly written.
Just started Patrick O’Brian’s Treason’s Harbour, the next in his series of Napoleonic sea adventures, which has Capt. Aubrey stuck ashore in Malta while his warship is being repaired all too slowly, and his friend Dr. Maturin under surveillance by French spies.
The Rhine: Following Europe’s Greatest River from Amsterdam to the Alps - Ben Coates
The subtitle explains it pretty well. The author, a British man living in Holland, explores Western Europe’s major river, from the North Sea to its source in the Austrian Alps. Not the most challenging travel writing assignment, but anyways…In between descriptions of quaint half-timbered homes and soaring cathedrals, there are discussions of the historical importance of the river, from the Roman times (it was basically the border between Roman and not Roman) up to World War 2.
Pleasant book, with a fair amount of British humor. Recommended.
I also recommend that I take another European vacation soon.
Started today on Joe Hill’s newest collection, Full Throttle. I have read several of these stories before, but don’t mind reading them again. I’ve been amazed by all of it so far…the man is just a wonderful writer. The only books I generally purchase are Stephen King’s, but I’m giving serious consideration to collecting Joe’s stuff as well. Five stars!
Just finished this book (The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane) last night. It was good enough to finish, but not good enough to recommend. The author is the type who will go to great lengths describing the way a person looks, the gestures they make, the way a room is decorated, etc. to the detriment of the story.
I just finished it yesterday, and found it moderately interesting.
What disturbs me is that Howe gets a lot of things wrong. She has her heroine, at her Ph.D. Qualifying orals at Harvard say that Cotton Mather was a magistrate at the Salem Witchcraft Trials. He wasn’t. He never had any jurisdiction over that region, and never sat on the courts. He helped arrange the court, and did go in FOR ONE DAY and inspected things, and he wrote a vigorous defense of the people who WERE the judges, but he was not himself a judge at the trials.
Her professor praise her for her accuracy in her examination. That hurts.
She says that no historian took Salem witchcraft seriously, and that no one believed that folk magic crossed the Atlantic to the Americas by Puritan days. Evidently she never read Chadwick Hansen’s Witchcraft at Salem, which shows pretty conclusively that witchcraft and folk magic WERE practiced at salem (and that book came out long berfore the date most of the novel is set, 1991). Nor all the other books that have been published on the practice of magic in Colonial New England since, all by reputable scholars.
If she was doing this to provide background for her story, I can understand her bending the vfacts a little, but it really isn’t necessary. She apparently was unaware of all the above.
Oh, well, I thought. She’s a first-time novelist working outside her field. She’ll get better with time.
Nope.
She has an MA in New England Studies from Boston University and lived in the Salem-Marblehead area.
!!!
And after this they got her appeared on multiple TV shows and hosted Salem: Unmasking the Devil for the National Geographic channel. And Penguin books got her to edit The Penguin Book of Witches !!!
There ain’t no justice in the world.
Started Andrew Mayne’s, Dark Pattern. It’s book 4 of his The Naturalist series. The series centers around Dr. Theo Cray, a computational biologists, turned serial killer hunter. Cray is somewhere on the sprectrum, and doesn’t get along with most people, but has a knack for seeing the obvious within the chaos.
Crucible: 1917 to 1924 - The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World.
One of my favorite times in history to read about are the late 1800s - early 1900s and, well, the birth of a new world. Planes, trains and automobiles etc, the US becomming a world power. The book is in chronological order, and alternates between different cities around the world and what is happening. Here are a couple of paragraphs (or pages) about what is happening in Petrograd. Then we move to London, then to Budapest, then to the front lines of the war, now a little about Einstein, then to Washington, and so on for 600 pages.
The book starts in Petrograd with the assasination of Rasputin, which of course would be followed by the assasination of Nicolas II. I’ve mentioned before that I have a fascination with Russia and have read several books up to the revolution. Not much about the specifics of what happened after. Coincidentally, just re-watched Reds the other night for about the 20th time. Emma Goldman - The dream may be dying in Russia but I’m not. I’m getting out.
I have a very good general knowledge of this time period, can’t wait to get immersed in the details. Not just about Russia but the entire world.
I’m about to finish In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made by Norman F. Cantor. It covers a wide range of history and conjecture, all linked to the great plague that decimated Europe in the middle of the 14th century. Some of Cantor’s conjectures and prejudices seem so outrageous, one wonders how he got such distinguished academic credentials! But it’s still a good read.
Very different in tone, though also covering a very broad range of causes and effects, is the book I read many years ago about the worldwide Plague eight centuries before the Black Death: Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World. Both books are fascinating.