Author Archives: smellincoffee

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About smellincoffee

Citizen, librarian, reader with a boundless wonder for the world and a curiosity about all the beings inside it.

America Walks into a Bar

Posted on October 25, 2022 by smellincoffee

America Walks into a Bar: A Spirited History of Taverns and Saloons, Speakeasies and Grog Shops© 2014 Christine Sismondo336 pages Welcome, friend. Pull up a stool.    You’ve come in at the tail end of a story, but it’s one … Continue reading →

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Armstrong

Posted on October 21, 2022 by smellincoffee

Custer of the West: Armstrong© 2018 H.W. Crocker III264 pages History records that General George A. Custer was killed at the Battle of Little Bighorn, ending an illustrious and often dramatic career. History is wrong, for  we discover in Armstrong … Continue reading →

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Life and Death in the Third Reich

Posted on October 20, 2022 by smellincoffee

Life and Death in the Third Reich© 2009 Peter Fritzsche384 pages A few years ago I read Peter Fritzsche’s An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler, which examined how the Nazi conquest of most of Europe permeated into its culture in … Continue reading →

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Teaser Tuesday: An innocent man in the arms of a redhead

Posted on October 18, 2022 by smellincoffee

Teaser Tuesday is a homeless meme adopted by me in which we share excerpts from our current reads. I stumbled upon a seriously entertaining novel in which George Custer survives the ambush at Little Big Horn and becomes a gun … Continue reading →

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Unstitched

Posted on October 13, 2022 by smellincoffee

Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and How People and Communities Can Heal © 2021 Brett Ann Stanciu224 pages Brett Stanciu had a problem. Someone kept breaking into her small library, pilfering money, and smoking cigarettes.  She knew who … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Selected Quotes From “What They Forgot to Teach You In School”

Posted on October 12, 2022 by smellincoffee

Shortly after reading On Love, I found another de Botton title in my library’s e-book collection, What they Forgot to Teach You In School. Unsurprisingly, I soon had four pages of quotes from the book. Below are just a few. … Continue reading →

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Nixon’s pyramid, the future, and intelligent octopus arms

Posted on October 12, 2022 by smellincoffee

At some point in the last year a book tipped me off to Tom Vanderbilt’s Survival City, in which the author tours ruins and remains of DC’s vast Cold War infrastructure while providing a history of the way popular fears … Continue reading →

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Teaser Tuesday: Unstitched

Posted on October 10, 2022 by smellincoffee

This week’s Teaser Tuesday is from Brett Ann Stanciu’s Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and How People and Communities Can Heal. I haven’t posted a review for it yet, but it was powerful. “Would you say you now … Continue reading →

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A thought of Thanksgiving

Posted on October 4, 2022 by smellincoffee

A year ago I was hospitalized with what could have been a life-ending illness. When I was told that I had chronic kidney disease and would need to be on dialysis for the forseeable future, I thought my life was … Continue reading →

Posted in General | 1 Comment

Top Ten Tuesday & Teaser Tuesday

Posted on October 3, 2022 by smellincoffee

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is “Favorite Bookstores”, or “Bookstores You’d Like to Visit”. As a child of rural post big-box America, I’ve only ever known places like Bookland, Books-A-Million, etc, and until recently could only visit ‘real’ bookstores while … Continue reading →

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